Pentecost - Dancing with Angels
“This grace of the Holy Spirit enables them... to dance with the angels.”
St Basil the Great On the Holy Spirit (Divine Office Bk II p.670)
I went to the sort of old fashioned grammar school that taught ballroom dancing to the Upper Sixth. It was the nearest we got in the 60s to sex education.
Although learning the Amanda Foxtrot with a hundred other boys, dancing, in Joyce Grenfell’s memorable phrase, ‘bosom to bosom’, was hardly calculated to turn us into ‘Come Dancing’ aficionados.
Yet there is something immensely enjoyable in the social patterns of dancing: the partnerships, the community, the shared knowledge, the complementarity of the steps, the public intimacy.
What else could explain the resurgence of that absurdity known as Line Dancing? Or the fact that almost as many people vote in Graham Norton’s Strictly Dance Fever as in the General Election!
Some have argued that contemporary club-scene dancing is yet another sign of postmodernity: individualism and self-expression; no rules and no partners; the breakdown of social coherence and mutual responsibility. The difference between The Little House on the Prairie and Friends.
But clubbing is supremely a social pursuit with codified rules of conduct and dress, not obvious to the outsider - but that is why they are an ‘outsider’. It serves the age-old purposes of waltzes and Morris dancing; of Stripping the Willow and Charleston; of ballet and ballroom.
Wherever we turn in the world, in whatever age, there is an instinct to worship and to dance. Perhaps with the exception of the Southern Baptists. The old Texan joke: “Why are Southern Baptists against sex before marriage? Because it may lead to dancing.”
We are familiar perhaps with the theology of worship; which reminds us that there is an image-of-Godness at the heart of our being, urging us to acknowledge the worth, to give worth-ship to, the invisible God who lies behind the glory and splendour of this world; who loves and beckons through the pain and burden of this world.
We are less familiar with St Basil’s contention that “This grace of the Holy Spirit enables us... to dance with the angels”.
Today is Pentecost - the fiftieth day (the origin of the word in Gk) after Passover when the pilgrim Jews celebrated the wheat harvest; 50 days after the Resurrection when the Ascended Lord was to send the Spirit; what became popularly known in the Christian Church as White or Whit Sunday, when the newly baptised wore white; the day when traditionally the collections were given to the Curate.
The Holy Spirit has always been the hardest member of the Trinity to understand. Fathers we know about. Some of our friends are Sons. Yet the Holy Spirit - he or she or it - there are good linguistic reasons for using any of these pronouns - he is the shadowy one of the three: the dove, the water, the oil, the fire, the wind, the breath - Scripture struggles with a surfeit of metaphors.
In the early discussions of the church fathers, one of the words used to describe the interrelatedness of the Trinity was ‘perichoresis’: the inter-animation of the persons of the Trinity. The late Professor Colin Gunton at King’s took up the word again more recently. In “The One, The Three and The Many” he writes that the word is “heavy with spatial and temporal conceptuality, involving movement, recurrence… and a dynamic, mutual reciprocity.”
We might put it more simply - dancing! The ‘choresis’ of perichoresis, comes from a similar root to choreography - the mapping of dances.
The dynamic of the Christian God, whom we honour next Sunday as Blessed Trinity, is the loving dance of eternity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit caught up in the wordless communication which we mimic in all our human dances.
It is no wonder that over the centuries the divine Liturgy has become a stylised dance. The synchronisation of movements, the courtesies, the communication beyond words, which even the congregation is drawn into through music and symbolic gestures; our acolytes the Fred Astaires of the sacristy.
The Holy Spirit draws us into the dance of the Godhead. The Apostles on that day of Pentecost were caught up like drunken revellers into the intoxication of the love of God. Heaven was opened and they were dancing with the angels.
You find it in mediaeval poetry. In the Christmas Carol, Tomorrow shall be my Dancing Day, have you ever noticed the words of the second verse as Christ talks about his incarnation?
Then was I born of a virgin pure,Or here is Evelyn Underhill writing in the middle of the First World War in Theophanies:
Of her I took fleshly substance;
Thus was I knit to man’s nature,
To call my true love to my dance.
Sing, O my love, my love,
This have I done for my true love.
Heaven’s not a place…And as we are drawn into the sacred choreography, so we take on the characteristics of the other dancers in the Trinity. The fruit of the Spirit produces the traits of the Father and the Son: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.
No! ’tis a dance
Where love perpetual,
Rhythmical,
Musical,
Maketh advance
Loved one to lover.
The charismata, the gifts of the Spirit, reproduce the works of the Father and the Son. So together as the people of God we bring healing and wholeness, wisdom and truth, freedom and justice to a world that remembers how to dance, but has forgotten why it dances.
By the indwelling Spirit we take on the Divine. St Basil goes on with great theological daring, dancing on the edge of heresy, to describe the work of the Spirit in we Christians who dance with the angels:
“So is their joy unending… so do they acquire likeness to God, so - most sublime of all - do they themselves become divine.”Ezra Pound once remarked: “Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance.”
We might extend that metaphor and say that Christianity begins to atrophy when it gets too far from the Holy Spirit.
In honouring the past, we must always be prepared to let the Spirit blow where he wills.
So, don’t sit around the edges of the dance like wallflowers, waiting for an invitation. You have been baptized. Christ has given you his Holy Spirit.
“And this grace of the Holy Spirit enables you... to dance with the angels.”
