The Dance Is The Thing

This past Sunday Fr. Cliff Polubinsky gave a brief, well-spoken reflection on the Christian experience of the Holy Trinity. Homilies on Trinitarian theology tend to get tedious and heady even among goo preachers, so I was grateful.

Cliff invited us to see our "walk with God" as more of a dance where we let our divine partner take the lead. It strikes me in re-imagining this dance that what is happening is less two partners dancing and more of a folk dance in which the three persons of the Trinity are inviting us to join hands and enter the circle. It is our task to allow ourselves to be caught up in this musical, mystical movement, to let ourselves go, trusting the leaders (remember, the root word for faith in the ancient languages is trust)>

It is an effort in any such dance to keep in step, to faithfully follow the lead and not forget our part. Everyone in the dance is important to the movement. And in some strange mathematics, then the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Each person in the dance retains his/her uniqueness yet is caught up in a transcendent unity.

A couple of weeks ago, during a Monday School session, I said something like "The struggle for the Christian is to live the trinitarian life: nurturing diversity and strengthening unity." in our broken human condition we tend to move toward either the diversity or the unity. To do both, it seems, we must enter the Dance of the Triune God. We know we are doing that dance when we feel like we are out of step with the world, moving beyond even what might be our own natural inclination. As the Gospel reminds us: we are in the world but not of it.

Alright, let's take this dance thing to a very practical level. What about the political fire storm presently being experienced concerning illegal immigrants? There is a most natural desire to shore up our boundaries so that our taxation rates, social identity and health systems are not more compromised than they already are. Not to mention the question of the rule of law. At the same time, immigrants are not simply numbers of a chart. They are real people who are often doing well the work we won't do. They bring a diversity which ultimately may strengthen national identity. And because legal matters in this country are often settled at the mercy of who-knows-who and how-much-money-do-you-have, it is difficult to trust that system on its own. No easy way in this issue to simultaneously nurture diversity and strengthen unity.

Whatever the solutions, the Trinitarian Dance calls for us to respect each and every person involved in this problem, thus avoiding the "them versus us" syndrome. The dance calls upon us to pray, seeking God's will whatever the cost to our personal sensibilities of the moment. We are invited to trust that f we are doing our parts, the leaders of the dance will not let go of us and will ultimately heal us and welcome all of us into the heart of the Triune home.