A friend recently criticized the popular use of dance imagery to describe the perichoretic life of the Trinity. I laughed and played along. I’ve been in churches that have tried to enact the perichoretic dance, and, trust me, it ain’t inspiring.
But then I want to say: Doesn’t that criticism assume that interpersonal relations, knowledge, and love are inherently un-dancelike?
But what if love, relationship, and love are a dance? What if dance is the shape of personal knowing? What if, as Esther Lightcap Meek says (Loving To Know, 351-2), knowing is “differentiated, covenanted, interpersonhood . . . artful and beautiful” like a dance? What if knowing requires a harmony of “mutual trust and individual particularity” – like dance?
If we say that, then to say that the life of the Trinity is a life of exhaustive interpersonal knowledge and infinite mutual love is just to say that the life of the Trinity is like a dance.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
Notes on Anosmia
One morning several years ago, as my wife, Wendy, and I were having breakfast together, I had…
Empire of Unreality
Shiva Naipaul (1945–1985) was the author of three novels and two books of mordant dispatches from places…
The Dreadful Christ of Pär Lagerkvist
It’s dangerous to meet a god,” says the disgraced Pythia in Pär Lagerkvist’s The Sibyl. Her observation…
