HELLO!

May 31^st is Trinity Sunday, a day that celebrates a core Christian belief. Possibly the most confusing of our beliefs, and also, perhaps, our most distinct: God is One and yet God is Three. God is made up of the Creator, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, these three are somehow distinct and yet they are One. We believe in one God who is made up of three distinct persons. I have come to understand the Trinity in this way, the Trinity exists in perfect community with one another. No hierarchy of importance, they all together in perfect love. There is a Greek word, perichoresis, used to describe the Trinity. Perichoresis means “to dance around.” The Three are always moving, interweaving, in a perpetual dance. And Vicky May will bring this to life with her sacred dancing.

This Trinity is dancing with each other in perfect community, and Jesus, through the incarnation, joins this dancing life of God – which is the life experienced in the Trinity – to the lives of humans. We are caught up in this dance with the Trinity. The most helpful book I have read on the Trinity is titled, The Divine Dance by the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr. Rohr describes an icon by the Russian iconographer Andrei Rublev. This icon depicts the three members of the Trinity sitting around a table, but the most important part of the icon is what’s missing. There’s a space at the front of the table, in that space there’s what appears to be a little rectangular hole. Art historians say there’s bits of glue stuck to this spot, which means something was once glued there, and do you know what they think was glued to the painting? A mirror! Andrei Rublev’s depiction of the Trinity included you and me. We are part of this Trinitarian dance!

The Trinity is not something to be understood intellectually, but something to be caught up in and carried by. The point is not so much how the Trinity works, but what the Trinity does. Jesus prays for this in John 17. Praying for his disciples and future disciples he says, “As you, God, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one.” (v. 21-23).

When I was an AST student, I was asked to organize social occasions that would bring the student body (40 full-time students, mostly mature in age) together. On one fall evening I invited a woman from an Eastern European community to teach us dancing where we all linked arms, moved in sync with each other, to the music. We were in the President’s House, thus space was restricted. So we danced around chairs, tables, etc…Something very mysterious happened that night, a feeling of a sacred presence permeated our community, the Creator’s intention, Jesus’ solidarity, and the Holy Spirit’s pulsing affection, raced through our bodies, we were one as God in the Trinity is One. A sacred/holy moment.

Peace, Kevin “who dances like the characters in A Charlie Brown Christmas” Little