The Snoopy Dance

This past Sunday at the 9 am reflection group, we looked at my book Holy Living, but before we dove into the book, I shared a Peanuts cartoon, a Snoopy cartoon, that I had seen recently.

In this particular strip, Snoopy is dancing.  It’s one of the things Snoopy is famous for … dancing.  Lucy chastises him for it in another strip, asking him how he can be dancing when the world is falling apart?

But in this particular strip, Snoopy is dancing, dancing to a tune only he can hear.  There is a tree behind him and a leaf falling from the tree.  In each panel, the leaf moves as it falls, to Snoopy’s right and to his left and finally, the leaf hits the ground.

At this point, Snoopy stops, bows to the leaf and says, “Thank you for this dance.”

I told the Sunday group this was an example of Holy Living, the joy in Snoopy as he dances and the recognition of the part the natural world plays in the dance.

But also, when Snoopy thanks the leaf for the dance, he is seeing the leaf, truly seeing the leaf, acknowledging its value, its worth and its importance.

Charles M. Schulz, who created Peanuts, frequently touched upon this theme of being seen or being understood.

In one famous series of strips, Charlie Brown puts a bag over his head, with two eyeholes, and finds himself instantly more popular when people can’t see him.  That’s called irony.  But it’s also poignant, because I would argue that being seen and being understood is something we all want.  And each of us has experienced times in our lives when we have felt unseen or misunderstood. 

As we see in today’s reading from Matthew 13:53-58, we see that not even Jesus is immune to being misunderstood, ironically, by some of the people who should know Him best, asking, “’Is not this the carpenter's son? Is not his mother called Mary? And are not his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? And are not all his sisters with us? Where then did this man get all this?’ And they took offense at him.”

It is frustrating, isn’t it, that the gospels shed very little light on who Jesus was between being born and beginning His ministry?  We are only given the one account in Luke 2:41-52 of Jesus disappearing and being found in the Temple.  When His parents admit their worry and concern over Him, having lost Him, and not knowing where He was, He asks them something along the lines of, “Where else would I be?”

Even then His own parents, Mary and Joseph, despite the angelic visitations surrounding Jesus’ conception and birth, don’t seem to see Jesus for who He truly is.  (Although if I had been put in charge of the Son of God and then suddenly lost him, I would be massively panicking too.)

Perhaps no one knows better than Jesus just how it feels to be misunderstood, to go unseen.  Even after the resurrection, Jesus nearly goes unseen by Mary Magdalene who thinks Him the gardener at first.  He goes unseen on the Road to Emmaus. 

But Mary Magdalene does eventually see Him and the disciples do have their eyes opened.

Because Jesus knows what it is like to be unseen, He makes a point of seeing others, especially those who are used to being invisible.  He sees the Samaritan woman at the well.  He sees (or hears) Blind Bartimaeus even though everyone else has tuned the man out.  He sees the lepers.  He sees the poor and the hungry and He does something about it.

Think about John 12:8 for a moment, where Jesus says, “You will always have the poor among you, but you will not have me.”  He says this after Judas, in particular, grows angry with Mary of Bethany for seemingly wasting very expensive perfume to anoint Jesus’ feet.

Two things here. 

Mary of Bethany sees Jesus.  She sees Him for who He truly is.  The perfume is not a waste.

But also, the comment about always having the poor with us has always struck me as a very pessimistic view of humanity on the part of Jesus.  It has always bothered me.  I want Jesus to have more faith in us.

And yet here we are two thousand years later and we still have the poor among us.

Why?

Because we don’t see them.  We don’t see the real them.  We don’t see them as children of God.  If we saw each other as God sees us, no one would go hungry.  No one would be without a home.  We would do everything in our power to provide for the least of us. 

Back to Snoopy’s dancing.

Snoopy doesn’t dance because he leads a worry-free, struggle-free life.  He frequently kicks the door in the middle of the night because he’s scared and wants to sleep in bed with Charlie Brown.  In one famous series of strips, Snoopy’s doghouse burns down, leading him to lament the loss of his Van Gogh.  He feuds with the cat next door.  He longs to be a writer but only receives rejection letters.

And yet, despite it all, he dances.

Snoopy’s dancing is clearly spiritual in nature.  Though he never refers directly to God, Snoopy’s joy stems from being seen by, being in communion with and being embraced by Love, with a capital “L.”

And that joy is infectious.

Is it any wonder that Linus, Lucy’s brother, the most spiritual and philosophical of the group, eventually joins Snoopy and dances?

Is it any wonder that Lucy, herself, finally joins Snoopy in his dance, because, as she says, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em?”

Who wouldn’t want to dance with Snoopy?

The world these days is filled with human beings who are completely blind and ignorant to the fact that we are all children of God.

The first step to being able to see others, is to first know that you are seen by God, that you are loved by Him, that He sees the real you, the true you, the good that you are and the good that you can be, and He’s asking you to join Him in the dance.

Amen.