Trinity Sunday 2006

Trinity - 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)

This reading in the Divine Office comes up each year as we move from rejoicing in the Resurrection to welcoming the Spirit at Pentecost and then on into the mystery of the Holy Trinity. Each year it strikes me afresh.

I went to the sort of old fashioned grammar school that taught ballroom dancing to the Upper Sixth. We used to get together with Worthing High School for Girls. The Amanda Foxtrot was the nearest we ever got in those days to sex education. We tried to be bolshy and to dislike it, but it was quite fun.

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.

Wherever we turn in the world, in whatever age, there is an instinct to worship and to dance. With the exception of the Southern Baptists. The old Episcopalian joke puts it well: “Why are Southern Baptists against sex standing up? Because it may lead to dancing!”

So St Basil’s contends that “This grace of the Holy Spirit enables us... to dance with the angels”.

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 ‘choresis’ of perichoresis, comes from a similar root to choreography - the mapping of dances.

The dynamic of the Christian God, whom we honour today as Blessed Trinity, is the loving dance of eternity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit caught up in the powerful, yet 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; through the spiritual vibrancy of knowing they are playing their part.

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,
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.

Or here is Evelyn Underhill writing in the middle of the First World War in Theophanies:

Heaven’s not a place…
No! ’tis a dance
Where love perpetual,
Rhythmical,
Musical,
Maketh advance
Loved one to lover.

Then of course there is that old Shaker favourite, Lord of the Dance… "Dance then wherever you may be, I am the Lord of the dance says he…"

And as we are drawn into the sacred choreography, so we take on the characteristics of the other dancers in the Trinity. Dancing is a great act of solidarity. (It’s part of the buzz of clubbing.)

The fruit of the Spirit produces the traits of the Father and the Son: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.

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.

I had lunch with some of my old students the other day.
One of them was Gammy Gordon - the affectionate name the other students gave him because he had a wonky leg. He never wanted to come dancing with us.

We finally persuaded him, but he stood at the edge, watching. Then a gaggle of the girls pulled him into the dance - and he danced!

And he realized that we all look a bit gammy when we’re dancing. And he didn’t look too gammy at all! It worked wonders for his self-esteem.

The God we worship, the Holy Trinity, is a loving fellowship of three in one. He is not remote and alone, but an intimate community. They are so wrapped up in each other, that they are indistinguishable. One in three and three in one.

But not so wrapped up that they have no time for us. Easter was when Jesus the Son, came to call us into the dance of the Trinity.

And although we feel all unworthy, and spiritually akimbo, gammy, in comparison, yet God the Father’s love draws us into the fellowship.

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 Christians who venture to 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.”

Don’t sit around the edges of the dance floor, or locked, like the disciples, in an upper room, waiting and watching. You have been baptized! Christ has given you his Holy Spirit! The Father has invited you to the dinner-dance at his Table!

You are called to partake of the Godhead in bread and wine and so to enter into life in all its fullness.

This is the mystery of our participation in the Blessed and Most Holy Trinity.

Or as St Basil put it:

“This grace of the Holy Spirit enables you... to dance with the angels.”