“Desert Dance” by Karan Hudson
Did you celebrate Trinity Sunday at your Church this week? The doctrine of the Trinity is mysterious, mind bending and challenging! Yet, it can also be life-giving and inspirational and help shape who we are as God’s people. Thinking about the Trinity has inspired liturgists, song-writers, poets and artists in their creative imagination.
The Trinity is a sign that our God wants to be known.
In his blog, English poet, Anglican priest and academic, Malcolm Guite said: “By coming to us as the Son, revealing to us the Father, and sending to us the Spirit, Jesus revealed the deepest mystery; that God is not distant and alone, but is three in one, a communion of love who comes to make His home with us.”
The Trinity depicts for us a God who is relational.
You may have heard of the term ‘perichoresis’. Theologians of the early Church adopted this term which reminded them of a Greek wedding dance – where there are three or more dancers who begin in circles, weaving in and out and then move faster and faster, all in perfect timing.
Feminist Catholic theologian Catherine LaCugna, speaks of perichoresis as the ‘Divine Dance’. The dance includes the inner weavings of the persons of the Trinity but also moves out to include others – with the circle drawing wider and wider – or even forming a spiral movement drawing in all of humanity and all of creation.
If you look, you can see this kind of spiral pattern in art, in architecture and in nature. (Look up the Fibonacci spiral!)
We worship a God who is deeply relational and invites us to join the dance.
In addition to or even alongside God as Trinity, there are other ways that God reveals God’s self to us. One helpful example is through the Uniting Church’s covenant with the UAICC (Uniting Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress). It is 31 years since we entered into a Covenant with the UAICC. Through this relationship we have been encouraged to think differently about how God makes God’s self known to us. By walking together we have been challenged in our own understandings of God.
This is reflected in the Revised Preamble to the Uniting Church’s constitution, where it says:
“When the churches that formed the Uniting Church arrived in Australia they entered a land that had been created and sustained by the Triune God they knew in Jesus Christ.
The First Peoples had already encountered the Creator God before the arrival of the colonisers; the Spirit was already in the land revealing God to the people through law, custom and ceremony. The same love and grace that was finally and fully revealed in Jesus Christ sustained the First Peoples and gave them particular insights into God’s ways.”
Currently on display in the Uniting Church SA Synod Office, the beautiful artwork, ‘Desert Dance’ is by Karan Hudson. Quoting Karan, “The red desert pea is the Spirit of God, which was already here before European settlement. The figures are the others in the Trinity, locked in a spiral eternal dance, joyfully and equally.”
I wonder where else you might see signs of God’ invitation for you to join in the Divine Dance?
Rev Linda Driver
Chair, CMLA Board
Trinity Sunday 2025