The Parable of Dance
Julianna Rubio Slager, photographed by Jeremy Cowart.
“Love all God’s creation, both the whole and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of light. Love the animals, love the plants, love each separate thing. If thou love each thing thou wilt perceive the mystery of God in all; and when once thou perceive this, thou wilt thenceforward grow every day to a fuller understanding of it: until thou come at last to love the whole world with a love that will then be all-embracing and universal.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
The muscles tremble under the strain but the dancer's face remains placid and reflective. It’s the duality of ballet having to perform feats of athletic prowess while betraying nothing of the inward pain. The art comes before their physical sensation. Inside the studio, with sweat dripping down an exhausted body, I looked over the potted soil and saw the leftover debris of the acorn shell strewn about the black earth. Tiny little fingers had pressed the seed deep into the soil. I looked over and saw my son smiling, his destruction of the acorn’s shell was meant to help speed up the process of growing a mighty oak tree. But he didn't realize that sometimes the boundary between the seed and the soil is what allows the tree to grow later on. Sometimes it's the struggle of decomposition that creates fertile soil for what comes next.
The boat tilted to the left and then gradually to the right as the Galilean waves lapped against the sides. Jesus' grip loosened as he sat down to teach the large crowd gathered around him. His teaching would raise more questions than answers in the crowd, as was his custom. He spoke to them about a farmer scattering seed, a springtime ritual they were all familiar with. As the seed sprayed from his waving hand, some would fall in less than ideal places. It would wither on the dry ground, it would be choked by the thorns, some would lack root in the rocky places, but some would land on good ground and yield a crop.
Many turned away to look for food that could fill the gnawing pain in their bellies. But a few drew closer to Jesus and asked him to explain the story of the seed. This is the power of the parable. It's an open invitation to draw close, to lean in, ask questions and to meditate. It holds truth behind the shell of a story where it can be accessed through patience, openness and humility. The seed is an analogy for the parable itself. The truth is hidden inside a husk that must be broken down slowly over time, decomposed, and turned into dirt so that the truth would have fertile ground to grow in. The people themselves were the hard ground and the thorny pathway. The parable was real life wrapped in a story. Sometimes the seed is snatched away. Sometimes the shell doesn’t decompose. Sometimes the seed is choked out – and sometimes it grows to fruition. And it’s the same with us. “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”
The struggle is necessary. The deconstruction is required for new life to grow. The gap between hearing, understanding, and then living the truth can be long and arduous, but that’s what it means to have faith in Jesus. It’s to take that next step after him even when we don’t know where he is leading us.
I step into the sound booth of the theater and take a deep breath to calm my nerves. This is the sacred moment of quiet before each ballet when I remind myself that even though the farmer scatters the seed, it’s God who makes it grow. The next two hours will be a blur of movement, lights, and music, but in this moment of quiet, I remember my place before God. Each performance is deeply personal to me. It's a story that’s birthed of mind and body. Stories of hope through clinical depression. Stories of joy in dark moments. It celebrates life. Honors the loss. There’s a kernel of truth from my experience with God that is wrapped up in the beauty of the show.
The applause slowly fades as I walk with the dancers back out onto the stage. I hear their heavy breathing trying to recover from pouring out every fiber of strength they had. Many in the audience have started to leave. But a few remain, ready to start the conversation of life and faith. This whole evening is a sacred space to me. It's where I see the Holy Spirit at work breaking down barriers and drawing people deeper into a life with God. As art is experienced, moments of challenge and healing come and go. But they're not given easily. They require two things that are exceedingly rare today. A quiet space and patience. Like seeds in the ground, new revelations don't happen in the busyness and chaos. They happen in quiet moments of proximity to God. The transformation for the disciples took place as they drew near to Jesus, saying, “Explain the parable to us.”
"But God understands the way to wisdom, and he knows its location." Job 28:23 CSB
We live in a world that wants to continually speed up the process of gaining wisdom. We play our audiobooks at double speed, we scan articles to glean the meaning, and move on. Entire business models are built on condensing the truth of books into 15 minutes summaries. We move fast and never stop to think. But when we look at Jesus, our true teacher, we find that he operated on a different time table. He knew that true wisdom grew in the fertile, silent spaces of contemplation and he arranged his teaching to lead people where connections between the literal, metaphorical and spiritual worlds took place.
It's in the quiet space of contemplation we often hear the still small voice of the Holy Spirit. And it’s this space that is increasingly rare for an oversaturated and undernourished society. And this is why I love ballet. The theater feels like one of the few remaining sacred spaces where we disconnect from the world and reconnect with our inner selves.
Ballet mirrors the mystery of Jesus’ teaching. In translating ideas to movement without the clarifying aid of speech, ballet leaves a wide chasm between movement and meaning. It communicates in a method deeper than the spoken word, it taps into the subliminal space of emotion through the physical body.
And when this art form lends its voice to the truth of God in cooperation with the work of the Holy Spirit, we see many of the same responses as to the teaching of Jesus. For some, the art is only as deep as the well of emotion they bring into the space. It remains an intellectual curiosity for the evening, and then is snatched away as new entertainment takes its place. Sometimes the heart is hard, unwilling to receive the truth and allow new growth. But for others, the space created in the work causes introspection. The ears hear and the seed finds soil in which to decompose and it transforms into something beautiful.
Paul explains it this way in 1 Corinthians 2:8-10; “We do, however, speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. 7 No, we declare God’s wisdom, a mystery that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began. None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. However, as it is written:
‘What no eye has seen,
what no ear has heard,
and what no human mind has conceived”—
the things God has prepared for those who love him—
these are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit.’ these are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit.”
Many have locked the front door of their mind to the truth about God. Through their life experience, they’ve come to believe that the seeds of Christian teaching grow into abuse, misogyny, greed, and grief. They’ll walk past the street preacher and the church steeple, but they will walk through the doors of a theater. And in that quiet space, there's a moment where a seed of truth can take hold in the fertile soul captured by the grit and grace of a beautiful story powerfully told.
May each of us have ears to hear when the Spirit is speaking.