To Dance with God
Howe, Fanny
RITUAL & THE HUMAN PSYCHE TO DANCE WITH GOD Gertrud Mueller Nelson Paulist, $9.95, 245 pp. Fanny Howe It is always a pleasure to discover a book that fits no categories, since an excess of...
...This book will answer that question and help both church community and family rediscover rituals involving psyche and action...
...In her relations with her own family , we see the ways in which she respects childhood without in any way diminishing the full use of her knowledge as an adult...
...Such a hole in time, the holytime-out is not only what the contemporary work ethic would have us believe — a coffee break so that we can return more efficient at the job/assembly line . . . Holy days refresh, replenish, and ratify our common experiences...
...Biographical details support her insights...
...Building rituals out of the mundane is a way of building bridges between the adult and the child...
...In this way she provides an unusual example of adult action...
...Herbs, fruits, breads, wine, gestures, candles, pictures, costumes, recipes, prayers, and songs follow alongside insights into the human psyche...
...Sentimentality wants the look of a jolly provider, a father who is buddy and pal...
...She writes: "The poetic, the symbolic, the sacramental, the mythic, though it is elusive and fitting, is just as true and real and just as valuable as what is rational, historic, scientific...
...they make what has become ordinary extraordinary...
...Fanny Howe It is always a pleasure to discover a book that fits no categories, since an excess of law and genre oppresses the book world these days...
...The child we all carry within us is restored in these pages and is given a choreography of worship to follow...
...Nelson, who studied art in Germany, taught in Montessori schools, and attended the C.G...
...To Dance with God is a sensuous and original narrative on the needs and howtos of rituals...
...Ritual in the home, as well as in the church, is 508: Commonweal the source of a sane and enduring community, Nelson insists...
...We like," she says, "the idea of a father who will sneak about in the night and while we sleep keep the world afloat and our enemy vanquished...
...And this indeed is her thesis as she offers ways to celebrate and transcend the rational (masculine) world and give meaning back to our passage through matter (mater, mother...
...From Advent to Lent to Easter to the Feast of the Assumption (a particularly passionate chapter in the book) Nelson provides a mix of sensible and inspired suggestions for conveying the holy quality of the day.' 'Holes are created in time through the creation of holidays," she writes...
...this is perhaps the major instruction of this book...
...The approach is feminist in its insistence on the validity of the domestic detail to inspire celebration of a profound nature...
...A book which belongs as well on one shelf as on another is a kind of "free" book, and must contain secrets worth exploring...
...Santa Claus as our hero for fatherhood is in danger of looking foolish or anemic or patronizing...
...When this book also happens to have God's name in its title and to be, presumably, a prescriptive book for Christians, its freedom from easy labeling is all the more stunning...
...Jung Institute in Zurich, has also illustrated this book, not with the clip art for which she is well known, but with full-blown pictures...
...The book seems to legitimize being a grown-up, a state which is not always held in thrall...
...How can we reconsider his image in the light of the whole truth...
Vol. 114 • September 1987 • No. 15
