JUNE72020

In The Color Purple Alice Walker reminds us how important it is to chase the wrong image of God out of our heads. If we think of God as a white man with a long beard sitting on a throne above it all our spiritual lives will be skewed. This monarchical portrait of God developed when the teaching of the Church of God as Trinity began to fade from Church discourse. The earliest thinking about God by Christians was not of a throne but of a dance. (Perichoresis was the Greek term — the English word choreography has the same root.) God is not above it all but participates in the divine dance where unity flows out of the relationships that exist in the very nature of God. Our spiritual lives are an invitation into the dance, into the ebb and flow, the movement, the gracefulness that characterizes relationships. The Christian tradition has adopted the words Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to describe this dance. As St. Paul puts it: The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with all of you. On Trinity Sunday we should not look on the doctrine celebrated this day as an obscure mental puzzle but as the opportunity to engage, to become involved, to participate — to dance.