To Dance with God

It takes a lot of imagination to be a Christian. If I believe Christ, then I am one with him just as he is one with the Father and the Spirit, yet they are three persons in one. Still more, if I am in Christ I have been brought into the Trinity itself, that whirling pas de trois of the three-in-one which the early church fathers called perichoresis (dancing around). This is perhaps one of the most imaginative realities that we engage as believers: our being united with the dancing Triune God.

How transformative it must have been for Christians in the early church to make this theological "discovery", though it was hotly, even violently, debated among scholars, clergy and laity alike. When at last the belief was crystallized at the Council of Constantinople and confirmed in the Nicene Creed, there must have arisen a new and existential sense of the relationality of God, a deeper glimpse into who God really is. If you believed in the Son, you became part of the dance of the Trinity and the reconciling power of the gospel was realized!

It's the difference between being at a party together with someone but doing and being altogether apart, or else being found with that person in the center of the dance floor entangled in a heated, writhing knot of dynamic knowing. I dare say that this is closer at least to the relational reality to which we have been invited in the gospel than many of our current ways of imagining what it is to know God. Do we know him as Trinity? Can we conceive of our own sway and leap and dip and grind as we are animated within the dance of divinity? Is it of any consequence in our concept of worship and of vocation?

As artists, we are especially equipped to enliven the awareness of God's people to his perichoretic imminence. The Wild One, the Holy One is dancing among us. He is within us and we are in Him through Christ. How does this truth transform the way we approach art-making or collaboration and even how we relate to our audience? The God of creation, who hovered over the waters, the God of the Exodus, and He who died and raised from the dead is now become your dance (Father), your dance partner (Son) and your music (Spirit).

The people of God have justly been accused of having an atrophied sense of imagination and a scarce appreciation for mystery. We cannot change the past, but let us not tolerate a lack of imaginative exploration in the midst of such wonderment, such mystery and beauty, as the gospel and the Spirit present to us and to the world. Let us look to the dancers and the dance makers. Let us look to the Spirit who calls out, "Shall we dance?"

Kenyon

* Holy Trinity, Andrei Rublev

Quarternity

Anselm Kiefer’s painting Quaternity depicts a bare wooden interior. The room is the artist’s studio containing three small, seemingly contained fires and a serpent. The three flames are labeled Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; the serpent is branded, Satan. I will not presume to read into Kiefer’s symbolism, but for the sake of this entry I will utilize Quarternity to make a statement regarding Christianity and the arts. As I see it they both sit in an upper story, an emptied attic, displaced by the preference for the technological, scientific, rationalistic and pragmatic. Despite the fact our society regards the church in this way, Protestant Christianity has created a similar attic to place art.

Yet Kiefer’s studio holds a key towards the integration of faith and reason, symbol and statistics, spirit and materiality. He depicts the Trinity as flames ready to ignite the embodied soul with real light in order to illuminate our fragmented world. At the same time we must be alert to the serpent in the room undermining the Trinity’s work by fracturing what should be united. Quarternity, four, not three, speaks of a God who acknowledges sin and moves beyond himself to address it.

Therefore, we too, must move beyond the ground floor status of rationality and integrate with the upper story. Our one God, Father, Son, and Spirit is the source of all creation. We must worship him not just with mind, will, and intellect, but with our whole embodied being. This means putting into our Spiritual practices things like drawing and data entry. God as one and three, restores matter and revelation and re-cast the idea of living inter-relationally with a dependence on both fact and fiction, faith and finance, relationships and retreats, art and religion.

The incarnate Christ has prepared a place for us in the Father’s house. To be sure it has many rooms, so with the Spirit’s help--the one who creates porous boundaries between disparate properties--let’s practice living life in the whole house, not just the attic.

--Maria

Regarding this entry listen to Jamie K.A. Smith's Gospel and Culture Lecture, Culture As Liturgy.