Dancing With a Limp

Description

As I sit with the memories from yesterday’s funeral service, I feel again how quietly holy it is when we gather around someone’s grief and practice the simple ministry of presence, where silence becomes a kind of prayer and gentle questions open a door for the heart to breathe. I watch people lean toward one another with care, sometimes stepping forward, sometimes stepping back, and the whole scene reminds me of what Swedenborg saw so often in the spiritual world, that love creates connection even when words falter and that every shared burden we carry together becomes a vessel for God’s tender leading. Anne Lamott’s line about a broken leg keeps echoing for me, that “you will learn to dance again, but you will dance with a limp,” and in that limp I see the strange beauty of a heart stretched open by loss, a heart that still moves, still feels, still loves. I witness this miracle at every funeral, this shimmering awareness that we belong to each other and that even in our hardest moments a quiet preciousness rises, almost like dawn, something you do not have to force or explain.