To A Dancer

It being New Year's, there's been a lot of print and air-time over the past couple of days devoted to the passing of celebrity "greats" this year.  Stories about high-profile passings are always preceeded by something like "football great Johnny Unitas" or "golf great Sam Snead" along with the details of their passing and their lives.  Our society notes the passing of Greats with great ceremony.  Sports heroes, famous writers, composers, scientists...if they've made a significant mark in our world, we note their passing with an honor and respect which borders on reverence.  We need to do this, I guess, because these people touched us in some way.  But the magnitude of their "greatness" makes them larger than life and , for most of us, inaccessible except through disconnected ways: the media, for example.  We have been conditioned by their stardom to note the passing of these greats.

Yet, Ecclesiasticus reminds us that there are some who have died who have left no memorial...no book, no symphony, no championship season.  They seem, as the scripture suggests, to have gone into oblivion with no one to even note their passing.  But I suggest that these people are the very ones who call us from the reverence we hold for the "greats" to that which we are truly to be about: getting beyond the superficial persona to the real person underneath and discovering something of ourselves in the process.

Ed died a little while ago.  He was the sexton of one of my churches here, though not a member.  Not many knew him, but they knew of him.  Sometimes he'd be seen in the church, cleaning with his mother and sisters.  Sometimes you'd see him hiking out the highway to home or pushing his janitor's cart around the hospital.  He was hard to miss - a very big man.  He was also the type of man you wouldn't ordinarily take an interest in knowing much about.  He never wrote a book, never conducted a symphony, never was great at a sport.  He was just Ed...custodian at the hospital and church sexton...so his passing didn't get much attention - no banner headline, no TV news item, no legacy of greatness...at least we didn't think so.

Ed did leave something really great - something which speaks to the heart of what it means to be a part of a community.  You see, Ed loved to dance...and he was really, really good at it.  Now, mind you, the image of Ed trundling out onto the floor to dance the night away with any and all comers is almost too much.  This was a man who weighed in, conservatively, at 400 pounds.  But when he was on the dance floor he could out-boogie the best of them from the first dance to the last and he knew every step, every fad, every move there was to move.  Unless you knew Ed, you wouldn't know, or even suspect, he was a dancer.  He wouldn't have volunteered it.  He was pretty quiet about a lot of things, including the major heart problems that ultimately ended his life.  Ed loved to dance and we had to be open to expecting the unexpected to see it.

Ed's passing was not notable...possibly not even noticed except by a few of us...but it was as important as the passing of any "great."  His passing is a wake-up call for us.  His legacy for all eternity is to leave us yearning to not miss another one and to find a way to allow ourselves to be vulnerable enough to get past the superficial stuff to the real person inside - regardless of who we think they are at first - to find a beautiful person, just like us, created by God to celebrate life and each other - and to dance.

Happy New Year,

Fr. Bo

6:19:40 PM
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