The Mantle And The Zills

We’d just finished rehearsal, and the studio still had that warm, almost musty smell of a room where people have been moving hard for two hours. I’d performed at three festivals in the span of a few weeks, and I was riding on the adrenaline that comes after a good season of shows, when your body finally remembers the choreography without having to really think about it first.

A few days later, my mentor waved a few of us into the back room after another choreography lesson. There were five of us, counting her. We stood among the costume racks and thumbed through her collection of kaftan dresses, heavy with beading and embroidery, every one of them catching the light whenever a hanger turned. A big art festival was coming in the fall, and we were dreaming out loud: which folkloric pieces might suit which dresses, who would dance what, how to stage the opening. It was the most ordinary, happy kind of planning. The kind you do when you assume there’s a next year.

The studio itself was far too large for us.

I’d noticed it for a while. The main floor could have held thirty dancers, and on most nights it held five, our music echoing off empty mirrors. Somewhere in the back of my mind I’d wondered how long a space like that could last on the few lessons she offered. But a week or so earlier she’d sent out notice of a small, very reasonable rate increase, and I took it as a good sign. She was watching her books. She had a plan. I stopped worrying.

A few days after we stood in that back room picking out costumes, she made an announcement. She was moving across the country to be near family. The studio would close in less than a month.

That would have been hard enough on its own….but it wasn’t on its own.

I started bellydancing in my mid-twenties and never fully stopped, even when life pushed it to the edges. At one point I was dancing semi-professionally. Over the years I’d been mentored by several teachers who were known around the world in that community, and one of them took me under her wing when she was at the very height of her career. She was so sought after that her instructional DVDs were sold in big chain bookstores. I still remember standing in a store aisle holding one of them and thinking… that’s my teacher. And she chose me to dance beside her on stage as part of the main act at the largest bellydance conventions in the country. I could hardly believe it then, and I’m not sure I fully believe it now.

Then her health turned, and she passed away.

Another of my mentors moved away. The great conventions, the ones that had shaped so much of my dancing life, stopped and never came back. And now the last of my teachers, the one I’d been planning a fall festival with only days before, was leaving too.

Years of memories came to an abrupt end. What I was left with was a closet full of hip scarves and props, my zills, and a lot of afternoons just…. remembering.

It might seem like a small thing to grieve. It’s a hobby, someone might say. You’ll find another class.

But I don’t think grief measures things by whether they’re hobbies. This was almost 20 years of my life. It was the women who taught me how to stand in my own body without apology. It was a teacher who saw something in me and pulled me onto a stage I would never have climbed on my own. It was a whole world, and it’s gone, not gradually but in a series of doors closing, one after another, until the last one shut in less than a month.

David wrote, in a season when he was running for his life, “You have kept count of my tossings; put my tears in your bottle. Are they not in your book?” (Psalm 56:8). I’ve always loved that God keeps the tears. Not only the great ones, the deaths and the betrayals, but the tossing and turning of an ordinary night. I don’t think He’s waiting for my grief to be big enough before He starts collecting it.

In this I’m reminded of the story of Elijah and Elisha.

Elisha had followed Elijah for years, and when the day came that God was going to take his master away, Elisha knew it. Three times Elijah told him to stay behind, and three times Elisha refused: “As the LORD lives, and as you yourself live, I will not leave you” (2 Kings 2:2, 4, 6). He walked with him all the way to the Jordan and across it.

Then the chariot of fire came, and Elijah went up in a whirlwind, and Elisha cried out, “My father, my father! The chariots of Israel and its horsemen!” And he took hold of his own clothes and tore them in two (2:12).

He didn’t pretend it was fine. He tore his clothes.

But then the text says something I’ve read dozens of times without really seeing. Elisha “took up the cloak of Elijah that had fallen from him” (2:13). The mantle was what was left. The man was gone, and the cloak was lying on the ground. Elisha picked it up, walked back to the Jordan, struck the water with it, and asked, “Where is the LORD, the God of Elijah?” (2:14).

And the water parted.

I think about that question a lot right now. Where is the Lord, the God of my teachers? He was with them in those studios, on those stages, in the years they poured into me. I’ve been left holding the scarves and the zills, which is about as close to a fallen mantle as a bellydancer gets. And I’ve been asking Elisha’s question with them in my hands.

It isn’t wrong to weep when a mentor leaves.

When Paul said goodbye to the elders of Ephesus, people he had taught and labored beside for years, he told them they would not see his face again. And Luke records that “there was much weeping on the part of all; they embraced Paul and kissed him, being sorrowful most of all because of the word he had spoken, that they would not see his face again” (Acts 20:37-38).

Paul didn’t tell them to pull themselves together. He knelt down and prayed with all of them, and they walked him to the ship.

The loss of a teacher is its own kind of loss. You aren’t only missing a person…you’re missing the version of yourself that only existed in that room, under that person’s eye.

When Moses died, Israel mourned him for 30 days.

“And the people of Israel wept for Moses in the plains of Moab thirty days. Then the days of weeping and mourning for Moses were ended” (Deuteronomy 34:8).

I’m struck that the mourning had a span. It was given its full measure, and it was also given an end. And the very next verse says that Joshua “was full of the spirit of wisdom, for Moses had laid his hands on him” (34:9). Moses was gone. What he had placed in Joshua was not.

I don’t know how long my “30 days” will be. But I find comfort in the idea that what my teachers laid on me doesn’t leave when they do. I still know how to stand. I still know how to listen to a drum and let my body answer it. Those things moved into me a long time ago.

I suppose if I’m being honest….I saw some of this coming and talked myself out of it.

The studio was too big. I knew it. One reassuring email about rates, and I set the question down and didn’t pick it back up. I tend to do that with the things I love most. I build on them as though they were bedrock and look away from the cracks, because the alternative is admitting that something precious might not last.

Hebrews says it plainly: “For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come” (13:14). I don’t read that as a call to love things less. I read it as a call to hold them with open hands. Every studio closes eventually. Every teacher leaves, one way or another. I’d been treating a good season as if it were permanent.

I also wonder whether some of what I’m grieving is a role. Being chosen, being the one on that stage beside her, was a gift that also became part of how I saw myself. Losing the community means losing a little of that, and I’m trying to be honest with myself about how much of the ache is for the dancing and how much is for being seen as a dancer.

“What you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also” (2 Timothy 2:2). The whole chain of discipleship depends on the learner eventually becoming the one who passes it on.

I’m not announcing a studio, but it makes me wonder if the mantle on the ground is not only something to hold and remember by. Elisha didn’t hang Elijah’s cloak on the wall. He picked it up and struck the water.

There’s dancing all through the Bible, if you look for it.

After the Red Sea, Miriam took a tambourine in her hand, “and all the women went out after her with tambourines and dancing” (Exodus 15:20). The psalmist calls for praise “with tambourine and dance” and, a verse later, “with sounding cymbals… with loud clashing cymbals” (Psalm 150:4-5). I can’t read that last line without smiling, because the closest thing to sounding cymbals I own are the zills sitting in a box in my closet.

And there’s a line in Psalm 30 that I’m holding onto, not as a promise I can schedule, but as a direction God has a habit of moving: “You have turned for me my mourning into dancing; you have loosed my sackcloth and clothed me with gladness” (30:11).

I still dance.

I’ve found other rooms for it, a swing night here, a line dance there, a little cabin on a hill once. But this particular chapter, the one with the kaftans and the convention stages and the teacher whose DVDs I found in a bookstore, has closed. I’m letting myself grieve it fully.

The zills and the scarves are folded in the closet. I’m not sure yet what they’re for. But Elisha’s question keeps coming back to me, and I’ve started asking it with my hands full instead of empty.

Where is the Lord, the God of my teachers?

I suspect He’s right here, waiting to see what I’ll do with the cloak.