Last Friday, January 27, brought a new, transformative light to Belmont Abbey’s Haid Ballroom.
As the audience sat in rows at the back of the room, a group of student artists prepared to begin “Dance in The Light,” the inspiration they’d brought to Kristin Hayes, Dance Program Director and Performing Arts Department Chair, just weeks before. In fact, although Mrs. Hayes had choreographed some of the evening’s performances, “Dance in The Light” was an essentially student-driven “evening of faith expressed through the arts.”
It seems particularly appropriate that students in a Benedictine, liberal arts college showed both the agency and the creativity to place art – whether music, dance, or word – in the service of divine praise. After all, loving praise is our highest vocation, and the Benedictine way illuminates the sacramental relationship between divine life and our tangible, everyday rhythms in community. Ora et labora, prayer and work, are not mutually exclusive or alternating acts. They comprehend and enrich each other in synthesis.
I love the profoundly sacramental reality inherent in this, which embraces all human creativity, artistic or otherwise. Those students who choreographed or danced, sang or recited during last Friday’s performance embraced the material, sensory reality through which they hoped to communicate the spiritual. They knew implicitly that, in the world of human encounter and experience, we rely on the earthly to mediate he heavenly.
Watching and listening last Friday, the audience applauded a variety of thoughtful performances, but even more beautiful than the deft motions and melodies was the fact that human creativity could, by the grace of God, articulate supernatural inspirations – like “the limitless love of God” or “the incomprehensibility of standing before Jesus” – in material form.
So this weekend, if you’re tempted (as I sometimes am) to impatience with the opaque, difficult, and even resistant physical world, I hope you’ll remember to “Dance in The Light,” where Christ waits to embrace our very humanness with His incarnate Love. For beauty – and its expression – will save the world.
