The Divine Dance, Mirroring, and Fall
It is fall in Minnesota, and I have been enjoying my annual, color-saturated walks through the forested parks that I am privileged to live by. I have been making myself pause throughout my days to soak in the sunlight as it shines through the yellow and red leaves, bringing them to life as dying embers.
I have also been re-reading Richard Rohr's The Divine Dance. It endeavors to illuminate the core doctrine of Christianity, The Trinity. It is one of my favorite books. The first time I read it, I finished it feeling held and fresh and energized. In the section called "A Mirrored Universe" he writes:
...[W]e know and accept ourselves in the very same movement in which we're knowing and accepting God; in surrendering to God, we simultaneously accept our best and fullest self. What a payoff! What a truly holy exchange! And it's all accomplished in the process of mirroring.
In the footnotes, he goes on to explain that mirroring is "...basic to the formation of self, both positively and negatively. We need 'self objects' that narcissistically mirror us back to ourselves, or we cannot begin to know who we are. ... We initially and necessarily 'use' others so that we can ironically stop using others-and can freely pass on the mirroring to others, instead" (pg 54).
As a Lutheran, I was raised to understand that the truest things in life are paradoxical, they are contradictory, they circle back around on themselves. I knew that this idea of mirroring had something to teach me about God, but I couldn't quite place my finger on it yet either.
On one of my walks on a strikingly still and sunny day when the sky is so blue and the leaves had all rusted orange, I came to a particularly beautiful section of the creek that the path trailed. Staring at the reflection of the canopy on its surface, what Rohr was saying about mirroring clicked for me. The creek by reflecting the transformation of the leaves was itself transformed. It became a creek in fall. And it became a creek in fall because I could look at the water and see leaves, not waves or rapids or the rocks that make up the creek bed. Even if I looked at nothing other than that creek on my entire walk, I would still be transformed into a leaf-peeper. If I had leaned my face over the railing of a bridge, then I appeared as a human on a walk in my neighborhood, curious and relaxed and filled with awe. Maybe the glint of the water would have been reflected in my eyes or my glasses. This is the dance that God the Trinity put into motion. A dance of refraction that touches and connects us all.
May you see God in the stillness.
