Love’s Braided Dance: Hope in a Time of Crisis
By Norman Wirzba
Yale University Press, 200 pages
Published October 29, 2024
Norman Wirzba offers a theology of hope in “a time of crisis” — primarily environmental, but also in response to tech-driven isolation, global displacement of refugees and numerous outside forces. In Love’s Braided Dance, he draws wisdom from earlier crises, whether the post-World War II desolation his German grandparents experienced or the violence of apartheid-era South Africa, imagining humanity in a kind of improvised dance with one another and the natural world.
When two tuning forks are placed in proximity and one vibrates, the other spontaneously responds. This, Wirzba reminds us, is resonance, and “(e)verything about people suggests they are created for resonant relationships.” Relationships with each other, the Divine and the created world are the core of Love’s Braided Dance. Wirzba’s farmer grandfather saw all of life as a sacred gift and created small moments of blessing, such as delighting his chickens with fresh grass or creating a rake that was equally useful and beautiful.
Love’s Braided Dance isn’t a “how-to” manual, yet Wirzba clearly believes action is essential to hope, as he demonstrates through examples like Greta Thunberg and the mothers participating in South Africa’s truth and reconciliation commissions. Market and cultural forces create restlessness and wanting, then respond with a false promise that these can be addressed by accumulation and exposure to their tech and media. And yet how much better to “activate” love, cherish shared spaces, take time and care with growing things, and pledge to care for one another, Wirzba writes, because “(h)ope has no future apart from a skilled and practiced cherishing of life.”
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