Doin’ the Happy Dance on a Monday Morning

January 12, 2009 by djackson.

Cesar Millan, National Geographic’s “Dog Whisperer,” has an article in the current issue of Parade Magazine entitled “What Your Pet Can Teach You.” Among other valuable life lessons he lists, “Celebrate every day.” The canine conjurer explains that “for a dog, every morning is Christmas morning. Every walk is the best walk, every meal is the best meal, every game is the best game. We can learn so much by observing the way our pets rejoice in life’s simplest moments.”

This struck me when I read it Sunday afternoon because that morning it had been my turn in the church nursery and I’d spent a good deal of the time with a two-year-old boy named Michael. No, I’m not equating dogs with two-year-old boys: Most dogs obey quicker, house-train easier, and smell better. But Michael demonstrated the same spirit of celebration. In a plastic bin of random toys, e discovered a tiny, battery-driven car and a wooden arch. He set up the arch and aimed the vehicle to drive beneath it. When this happened, he clapped his hands, said, “Yay!” and even waved both hands in the air. He gazed raptly in my direction, inviting, even insisting that I participate in the party. And he did this over and over - all that emotion and energy for the simple event of watching a plastic car roll under a crescent of knotty pine.

This festive spirit reminded me of my own sons at that age. We used to give our oldest a Flintstone’s vitamin every day; you know - Barney, Wilma, Dino, that gang. Each morning when I pulled a pill from the bottle, my son would ask, “Which one is it?” When I told him, no matter which character I’d drawn, he’d declare, “My favorite!” And I remembered taking a bike ride with the younger boy on a Sunday afternoon when he was five or six. We’d cruised around the neighborhood for a while when he suddenly blurted out, “This is the best day ever!”

G. K. Chesterton understood this canine-and-kid enthusiasm when he wrote in Orthodoxy that “a child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again’; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.”

In The Everlasting Man Chesterton describes the moment of each young Adam’s fall from this state of grace. “There comes an hour in the afternoon when the child is tired of ‘pretending’; when he is weary of being a robber or a Red Indian. It is then that he torments the cat.” He continues,

There comes a time in the routine of an ordered civilisation when the man is tired of playing at mythology and pretending that a tree is a maiden or that the moon made love to a man. The effect of this staleness is the same everywhere; it is seen in all drug-taking and dram-drinking and every form of the tendency to increase the dose. Men seek stranger sins or more startling obscenities as stimulants to their jaded sense. They seek after mad oriental religions for the same reason. They try to stab their nerves to life, if it were with the knives of the priests of Baal. They are walking in their sleep and try to wake themselves up with nightmares.

So a sense of wonder at the merely good saves from boredom with the holy, and the ability to party over littleness delivers from the malaise of nothingness. Maybe this was some of what Paul was getting at when he commanded us in Philippians 3.1 to “rejoice in the Lord,” and added the disclaimer that “to write the same things again is no trouble to me, and it is a safeguard for you.” The word safeguard means “to be secure” and gives us our English term asphalt. Joy places a smooth surface over the pits and ruts of life, paves our path on the narrow way and saves us from the stumbles of sinful indifference. No wonder Paul returns to this them in Philippians 4.4 as he admonishes us to , “rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice!” Perhaps Jesus managed not to turn the stones into the bread that the weren’t because he retained the ability to delight in the excellent rocks that they were.

So by God’s grace I will whoop it up today. Oatmeal for breakfast - my favorite! The best cup of coffee ever! May we celebrate our way to sound footing and pave the pilgrim path with rejoicing in the routine.

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