In many cases, seeming opposites are actually ‘dance partners’ in the never ending flow of the Cosmos. Protons are positively charged, electrons negatively so, and their balanced pairing is what holds atoms together and makes all the matter in the universe possible. The force of gravity by the Sun on our planet is balanced by ‘centrifugal force’, so that the Earth neither plunges into the Sun nor flies off into the abyss of space. And without the dance of male and female, almost all life — trees, flowers, fish, insects, reptiles, birds, mammals and humans — all would die out in a single generation.
The rabbit dies to give life to the wolf. The wolf dies to give life to plants and insects. Plants are eaten to give life to the rabbit. And the circular dance between prey and predator, between Life and that which must die to feed Life, goes on and on.
Of course, from the rabbit’s personal perspective, the wolf is a terrible thing! But if we can expand our imagination, and dimly sense through a glass darkly the Totality and our infinitesimal place in the Greater Whole, then perhaps we can catch a fleeting hint of the Awe-full Majesty that is the Dance of Life and Death in which we too find ourselves for so brief a moment in Time.
The Episcopal Book of Common Prayer has a marvelous sentence: All of us go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.
Or, better still, Thomas Merton (1915-1968, a 20th century Catholic mystic):
For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity and despair. But it does not matter much, because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to or not.
Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance.