Daily Dose (August 12 – 15)

August 11, 2025
SM Daily
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TUESDAY AUGUST 12 —

“Creation of art and music is cathartic and reinvigorating. It can inspire action, collaboration and resistance… Music eases our minds during difficult times in our lives. It reminds us that we are a community. We are all in this mess together… Music reminds us that even when life is difficult or when the odds are stacked against us, life itself is beautiful and worth celebrating.” (Thank you, Jethros Band)

Robben Island is famous. It is the South African prison where Nelson Mandela and many others were incarcerated because of their struggle to end apartheid. (Mandela served 18 of his 27 years in Robben Island). Margaret Wheatley tells this story of a time that she had the unique privilege of touring Robben Island (now a UNESCO World Heritage Centre).
The tour group stood in a long narrow room that had been used as a prison cell for dozens of freedom fighters. Picture yourself in a space crowded, cramped and barren. The prisoners lived without cots or furniture, cement floors now their beds. The only light entered through narrow windows near the ceiling.
The tour group listened to their guide’s narration. “I was a prisoner in this very room,” the guide tells them. The gravity of his words co-mingles with the cold seeping up through the floor. There is a chill.
The group stares through prison bars, surveys the lifeless cell, and tries to imagine the stories about the suffering from relentless threats and capricious brutality.
The guide pauses, as if remembering, gazing the length of his former cell. Speaking quietly, almost a whisper, he says, “Sometimes, to pass the time here, we taught each other ballroom dancing.”

Okay, when I first read this story, I wasn’t ready for that ending. Even with the gut-wrenching bleakness, I confess to grinning, and then, laughing out loud.
Ballroom dancing? A group of demoralized and weary men, beaten down and brutalized, teaching one another to dance. You gotta love it.
And yes, we know that “it is wiser to light a candle than to curse the darkness.” But let’s be honest. Sometimes life is dark and not fun. Adversity is real. Life can be cruel. (People can be crueler.) Suffering happens. Suffering hurts. We reach a tipping point. And prison walls are made of real concrete. And finding a candle is not always easy, let alone the motivation to light it.
This story keeps my hope alive. (Borrowing from Larry Murante’s song, Nelson, “He took a bite out of apartheid… Nelson keeps my hope alive.”)
And I love this story because it is so counter-intuitive. Let me get this straight, in times of anxiety or fear or suffering or distress–when our equilibrium is catawampus–we are invited to open our heart? We are invited to dance? The prisoners would say yes.
That in adversity, the medicine of intimacy allows us to become more human.
That even times of sorrow or discontent can become fertile ground for generosity of spirit, mystery, delight, touch, tenderness, vulnerability, risk and yes, even gladness.

WEDNESDAY AUGUST 13 —

Give yourself a gift. Watch “War Dance”.

“The war stole everything, except their music.”

This is a heartwarming documentary about war refugees set in war-ravaged Northern Uganda, children who demonstrate the primal healing power of music and dance. The story follows children from the Acholi tribe, now war orphans representing the Patongo Primary School in a national music competition, where the children compete and celebrate the power of music and dance, to heal our deepest, emotional wounds.

It does the heart good. To celebrate the power of music and dance, to transmute fear and pain into profoundly cathartic spiritual affirmation.

We follow Nancy, Domenic, and Rose, three children who have suffered horrific brutalities, who momentarily forget their struggles as they participate in music, song, and dance at their school. Invited to compete in the prestigious music festival in their nation’s capital, their historic journey is a stirring tale about the power of the human spirit to triumph against tremendous odds—cultivating joy, laughter, exhilaration, and hope.

Apropos, I read this affirmation today from Anne Lamott (in the LA Times). “Hope comes in many forms: When I hear the songs of the civil rights movement at our marches, a soft gong sounds. The poet Jack Gilbert wrote, ‘We must admit that there will be music despite everything.’ Ever since I heard the author Caroline Myss say that when darkness and evil go nuclear, love and hope must go nuclear too, I started getting occasional manicures with glittery polish, to remind me…

Laughter and those jaunty songs break up the armor that we think protects us. When we’re softened and jiggled, we’re open to a shift from tight and clenched to the recognition of shared humanity, and underneath that a glimmer of shared possibility…

I hope we don’t go crazy with the craziness around us. I can’t remember a more terrifying time. I hope that we can keep centered, keep sharing what we have, help each other keep our spirits up, sing, register voters and rally, and maybe these are all we’ve got these days, but deep in my heart, I do believe that led with infinite dignity by the Ministry of Silly Walks (Monty Python), they will see us through.”

I will say this; it’s not easy to dance when we are experiencing our hottest days of the year. In an area where air-conditioning is a “wouldn’t that be nice” upgrade feature. And we’re not the only ones. I see heat advisories for many areas in the US, Canada and Great Britain today. So. Stay hydrated and cool my friends, and be on the watch for people you know who could use a helping hand.

THURSDAY AUGUST 14 — Before my morning walk, I picked blackberries. And sample a few while I’m picking, of course. It is the beginning of blackberry season here in the PNW. They are ubiquitous here, good food for the Robins, waxwings, and thrushes, and heavenly in a blackberry cobbler. The conundrum for someone of my height, is being able to reach most of the berries. I’m sure there’s a sermon in there somewhere. But it was easier to go fetch my ladder.
I picked a quart for starters, put the ladder away, and then smiled real big and did a little dance. Well, more like a balter, so I’ll call it my blackberry balter.

And it reminded me of a Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov (1698-1760) story. The founder of the Chassidic movement, the Rabbi was asked: “Why is it that Chassidim burst into song and dance at the slightest provocation? Is this the behavior of a healthy, sane individual?”
The Baal Shem Tov responded with a story: Once, a musician came to town—a musician of great but unknown talent. He stood on a street corner and began to play. Those who stopped to listen could not tear themselves away, and soon a large crowd stood enthralled by the glorious music who’s equal they had never heard. Before long they were moving to its rhythm, and the entire street was transformed into a dancing mass of humanity.
A deaf man walking by wondered: Has the world gone mad? Why are the townspeople jumping up and down, waving their arms and turning in circles in middle of the street?
“Chassidim,” concluded the Baal Shem Tov, “are moved by the melody that issues forth from every creature in God’s creation. If this makes them appear mad to those with less sensitive ears, should they therefore cease to dance?”
Now I know. Picking blackberries is my “provocation to dance”.
And here’s the deal: especially in trying times, dance—celebration of life—fuels and fosters hope. Let us continue to dance.

I am writing this on the place from Seattle to Albuquerque, where I’ll spend three days with Certified Lay Ministers. We’ll find replenishment, tell stories, laugh and cry, and maybe balter just a little.

FRIDAY AUGUST 15 —

Today, I want you to meet Mr. Bramwell.
Life turned left for him with dementia (literally meaning de-mented or deprived of mind). “Dementia challenges what we think of soul, spirit, and personality,” Dr. Victoria Sweet writes in God’s Hotel. “Which was why, when I saw Mr. Bramwell dancing to the tune of Glenn Miller, I never forgot it.”
Dr. Sweet paints us the picture of when they met. “Mr. Bramwell was sitting in the chair by his bed, dressed in dark blue pressed chinos and a green plaid shirt with the collar buttoned all the way up. He was African-American and dark brown, with a wide face, slack jaw, and incurious eyes, which stared at his own hands tapping softly on the table in front of him. Mrs. Bramwell was standing next to him. She was beautiful. Tall and statuesque, she was calm and confident in high heels and nylon stockings, a maroon skirt-suit, and an elegant green wool coat. Which sounds like it would clash, but against her dark, clear skin, did not. She was probably the same age as Mr. Bramwell, which was seventy, although she could have been ten years younger. She just couldn’t manage Mr. Bramwell any longer, she told me. The Alzheimer’s was just too hard.”
We learn the background about the Bramwells, about their six children, and his construction business and his drinking too much, and how he had quit, and how he’d been in a car accident with head trauma, and how they didn’t know if his slowing down and crazy talk was from the drinking or not.
With any profound but rather static dementia, how do we know the beginning with any certainty?
In her exploration of circumstances, Dr. Sweet describes medical conditions, pseudo dementia, schizoaffective, and Parkinson’s. I do get that part, you know, the urge to make sense of it all. We want to find the words. With the hope that understanding the recipe of any adversity will allow us to find the ingredients that are treatable.
Of course, restoration is never an easy or short process.
Just to get Mr. Bramwell off his medications and treat his depression took more than a year. “And I wish I could say that he had a remarkable improvement. But he did not. He continued to be kept and shaved, with his little smile and his tapping hands; and Mrs. Bramwell continued to visit him every day, bring in home-cooked food. Then one day Mr. Bramwell demonstrated one of the oldest observations about dementia; that even when a patient is de-mented, his soul, his anima, is still… somewhere.”
Hospital activity therapists are enthusiastic individuals with a perplexing job, in the case of Laguna Honda, coming up with activities to engage the demented and disabled.
And a storyline sadly familiar; because of policy or funding, the program at Laguna Honda had been discontinued.
Even so, at Laguna, there was still a weekly dance. Well, there was a room with 90 patients in folding chairs or wheelchairs. And nurses dancing, with various levels of both oomph and skill. Dr. Sweet watched a young Filipino nurse throw out her arms and pull up a patient to dance with her. It was Mr. Bramwell. He stood confused and uncertain and swaying. Was he afraid to fall?
He stood, slack jawed, open mouth, a puzzled look on this face. Then he lifted his right hand and took her left hand, and began to dance. And though he no longer remembers how to talk or how to clean himself, and barely how to eat, he wasn’t a bad dancer. Actually, he was a very good dancer.
Then he danced with another nurse, twirling her and smiling, manly, in control and suddenly young.
Reading the story today, I’m smiling from ear to ear. I can’t help it.
“From the ashes a fire shall be woken, a light from the shadows shall spring.”
Yes.
Then the music stopped, and Mr. Bramwell stopped, too. He slumped, he stooped, he came to a halt; he forgot the dancing and shuffled with the nurse back to his ward.
“But I didn’t forget,” Dr. Sweet writes.
I wonder, is he now waiting for those first strains of Glenn Miller to sound again?
If you ask me what makes a good sermon or homily, I’d say that making space for the first strains of Glenn Miller isn’t bad.
I want to keep my smile and my hopefulness, but it gives way to sadness. Because I have to recognize that this story is not about silver bullets. Or about any cure-all.
But this is a story about healing. And about what is alive (even though) deep inside.
So, here’s the deal: when I despair, I want to know that the people who love me ask, what will invite him to dance?
You see, all healing begins with an invitation.
Yes, the circumstances are very real. But I want you to know that I see the dancer in you.

I am writing this from the Norbertine Spirituality Center at Santa Maria de la Vid Abbey in Albuquerque. Guided by the Norbertine Community’s communal song, “All are Welcome” by Marty Haugen, the Norbertine Spirituality Center strives to embrace the call to a ministry of radical hospitality, as together we respond: “Let this house proclaim from flor to rafter: All are welcome, all are welcome, all are welcome in this place.”

Prayer for our week…
Hineini (Hebrew, “Here I Am”)
On this day may I be present
to the Miracle of being alive.
May I reach out to those who are suffering
and may I use my voice as a force for good.
May I have the courage to do what is right,
not what is easy.
May I have the strength to shine a light in the darkness.
May I not distance myself from myself.
Joanne Fink

Photo… “Dear Terry, I’ve been observing the dirt for the Dahlias to begin to produce and your words this week were spot on (Point Defiance Dahlia garden)! The garden of our souls need the same replenishment and nourishment. Thank you for allowing the Holy Spirit to work through you,” Marguerite Gerontis… Thank you Marguerite… and thank you for your photos, please send them to tdh@terryhershey.com