Trinity - Dancing with Angels
Preached at Hertford College Oxford“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 boys grammar school that taught ballroom dancing to the Upper Sixth. It was the nearest we got in the 1960s to sex education.
We hated it. Yet there was, and 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 voted 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.
They see the difference between modernity and postmodernity as the difference between Foxtrot and Industrial Techno; The Little House on the Prairie and Sex in the City; or, if you’re into it, the difference between the original Star Trek & Deep Space Nine.
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 both to worship and to dance. Perhaps with the exception of the Southern Baptists. The old Texan joke: “Why are Southern Baptists against sex standing up? Because it may lead to dancing!”
So what of St Basil’s contention 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 late Professor Colin Gunton at King’s London took up the word again more recently. In “The One, The Three and The Many” he writes that the word ‘perichoresis’ is “heavy with spatial and temporal conceptuality, involving movement, recurrence… and a dynamic, mutual reciprocity.”
We might put it more simply than the good Professor - 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 today 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.
You find it in mediaeval poetry. In the Christmas Carol, Tomorrow shall be my Dancing Day, 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…Then of course there is that old Shaker favourite, Lord of the Dance:
No! ’tis a dance
Where love perpetual,
Rhythmical,
Musical,
Maketh advance
Loved one to lover.
Dance then wherever you may be,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, of togetherness. That’s part of the buzz of clubbing, of dancing, of being part of the throng of people.
I am the Lord of the dance says he…
And in that solidarity with the Holy Trinity, the fruit of the Spirit produces in us the traits of the Father and the Son: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.
Then the charismata, the gifts of the Spirit, reproduce in us 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 a message on Facebook yesterday from one my old students. His fellow students all called him affectionately Gammy Gav because he had a wonky leg. He never wanted to come dancing with us. (I taught a course on theology and culture and it was de rigeur to go clubbing on Friday night.)
We finally persuaded him, but he stood at the edge, watching. Then a gaggle of 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, into the dance.
And as we are caught up in the joy of the Blessed Trinity, we are transformed into the likeness of God: we become noble humankind and not brutish animals. Or as St Basil puts it, with great theological daring:
"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.”
Christianity begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the unpredictable dynamic of the Holy Trinity.
So, don’t sit around the edges of the dance: the cynical onlookers of church life. We have enough of those. You’ll atrophy! You have been baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
“And this grace of the Holy Spirit enables you... to dance with the angels.”
