“Loose ankles!” The dance instructor shouted over the music and the tapping. I looked at my own ankles as I tried to mimic her movements. That was probably another rule broken – ‘Don’t look down!’ I am apparently a consistent rule breaker.
I glanced from my own rigid feet to my daughter’s. She moved smoothly, her black shoes kicking outward, the metal on their soles striking the floor musically as they did. Her toes tapped gracefully, fluidly. Loose ankles indeed were key.
“I can’t do this,” I laughed to her as we did Buffalos across the floor, she carefreely connecting steps while I continually tripped over mine.
“Mommy,” she encouraged. “You’ve got it! But your ankles are still too stiff. It’ll look better if you relax.”
I don’t normally take tap dance lessons. That’s clearly my daughter’s domain. But this was “Take Your Parent to Dance” week, so, here I was, self-consciously jerking from one foot to the other, trying to perfect something I was far from perfect at.
As I crossed the floor, trippingly out of sync with the tune the teacher demonstrated, she encouraged, “You’ll get it! It takes time to just let go.”
I understood what she meant. Most of my adult life has been one long lesson in letting go.
When we lost our first babies to miscarriage, I was called to relinquish the dreams I had for what our family would look like and to accept the family that God would give us.
When my health failed and I tried to restore it by closely monitoring every morsel I ate, my son urged me to release my punishing grip on my strict diet, quipping, “You know, Mom, that to be so obsessed with your diet is also not to trust God with your well-being.”
And each day that I am confronted with my growing children’s increasing independence, I am invited to let them go, little by little, from the control of my hands and into God’s.
Indeed, it can take a long time to let go, because often the hardest thing to believe is that what God has in mind for us is better than what we have in mind for ourselves. When we’ve been hurt by the trials of this life, it’s easy to assume that God does not have His eye on us, and so we must be constantly vigilant in His stead.
But the truth is that God is never absent. “Even all the hairs of your head are numbered,” Jesus promises in Matthew 10:30.
In the next verse, after asserting that not one sparrow falls to the ground without the Father’s knowledge, He urges, “Do not be afraid, for you are worth more than many sparrows.”
Still, our Holy Mother Church knows how challenging it is for us to fully entrust our lives and the lives of those we love to God. After all, if even our first parents failed in this regard, so, too, do we. But just as God declared a remedy to Adam and Eve’s sin in our Savior, so, too, our Church offers us opportunities to grow in faith in Him and to find the freedom that exists in releasing ourselves into the Father’s hands.
The season of Lent, at first glance, appears to be a time solely of penitence and reparation. And, surely, it is. In increasing our dedication to prayer, fasting and almsgiving, we certainly seek to atone for our own sins and those of others, just as Our Lady of Fatima implored us to do. But if we dig further beneath the surface of these penitential acts, we find a beautiful purpose that is too often easily overlooked.
In making more time for intimacy with our Lord in prayer, we make room in our hearts to better know Him and to better experience His love for us. When we know we are loved, we can more effortlessly entrust ourselves to the one who loves us.
As we fast during Lent, it is easy to focus solely on the act as justified punishment. But on the other side of this perspective, Our Lord invites us to discover a freedom we might never know if it weren’t for this act of unshackling ourselves from our bonds to this world so that our hands and hearts are empty and open for the more lasting goods He desires to place in them.
The third pillar of Lent is a natural next step on the road to freedom as we share gifts with those who are lacking in what we have. In almsgiving, we are invited by Holy Mother Church to relax the grip with which we hold on to our possessions in order to release them to another. In this act, the blessing this is to the receiver is sometimes more obvious than the gift it is to us. But even as we feel unease in giving away our possessions, we are released from the stress of the things of this world and are, instead, free to be solely God’s.
St. Pope John Paul II once said that “The purpose of Lent is not to force on us a few formal obligations, but to soften our heart so that it may open itself to the realities of the spirit, to experience the hidden thirst for communion with God.”
Let us allow the Church to be our teacher, guiding us through the steps of this holy season. Let us follow Her lead as we learn to loosen ourselves from our rigid hold on what we imagine we control. In so doing, may we find the joy that comes in dancing through this life in the freedom that can only be found in surrendering ourselves to our Creator.
Michaelyn Hein is a Catholic writer, wife and mother, who resides in Hopewell, New Jersey.
