This phrase, “dance with who brung ya” is familiar to people in Texas who were around when Darrell Royal was the University of Texas football coach. The meaning is pretty clear, you are usually better off using the players and plays that got you to where you are now.
Most people do exactly that, dance with who brung ’em. We keep doing what we have always done. The danger with this is that there comes a point when being loyal turns into failure. A colleague of mine (and I am sure he didn’t coin this) loved to say, “If you keep doing what you have been doing, you are going to get what you have always got”. Isn’t this a definition of insanity? You keep doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result.
The sad thing is, we keep doing the same thing in our spiritual lives. We simply do what we have always done: go to church, go to Sunday school, tithe, and attend Wednesday night services. We expect that this will make for a strong spiritual life, but it doesn’t. Quite often we are not really invested in what we are doing, we are just checking things off our to do list. We keep “dancing” with a very basic and childish idea of what faith and spiritual life is and expect that we will be blessed.
In the letter to the Corinthians, we read that Paul wanted to feed these new Christians solid food, but they were only ready for milk. His point to them (and us) was they were not growing, they were choosing to be stuck at the infant stage of the spiritual life. They kept dancing with who brung em. This might work for football, it does not work in the spiritual life.
Richard Rohr speaks of us being in an ever changing dance, as we see in the Trinity. The dance steps continuously change, but the dance goes on, to new places. Sometimes scary places, but we dance together. The Trinity is Father, Son and Spirit. I believe our dance is us, God, and our spiritual community. If any one of the partners is missing, there is no balance, we are dancing alone!
Thomas Merton said, “dance in this sun, you tepid idiot”. He was referencing the idea that we have discovered that God has “found” us, that we have always been with God and that all we really need to do is dance the Holy dance with our Creator. The steps don’t matter, just let God lead and let’s dance with the one who has always been our Partner.
TMM