Dancing Our Life

“…so that everyone who believes in him…may have eternal life.” John 3:16-18.

by Fr. Tony B. Lalli, SX | Our Lady of Fatima Shrine, Holliston, MA

The late presdient of Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta, liked to invite the ambassadors to his country to the celebration of the national feast days of his country. They would sit for hours watching people dance their traditional dances. One of the ambassadors once complained to the president of this use of their time. The president replied that the core of African culture is the celebration of life, and that you can’t do that better than by dancing.

You don’t have to be African to like dancing. Whenever an ethnic group celebrates a folklorist festival, you can be sure there will be dancing.

Dancing is so much part of our human nature, we might ask ourselves if it is inborn. Haven’t you seen small children dance around their very serious looking mothers on their way to kindergarten?

The Bible says: “God created human beings in God’s own image: make and female God created them.” If it is so natural to us to dance, is it in God’s nature to dance? Has it to do with our promised eternal life?

From ancient times Christian mystics and theologians have been trying to understand the life in God’s Holy Trinity. How do those three relate to each other? A difficult question. All kinds of technical Greek terms were used to answer it. One of the terms used was perichoresis. Maybe you recognize something in that word. Some common English words find their root in it: choir or chorus, choral, carol, carolling (which originally meant to dance in a circle).

Ancient mystics described God’s inner life as a dance, perichoresis, a circle dance where the Trinity embraces all humanity and all the cosmos. They thought (and felt) that the persons of the Blessed Trinity are celebrating their divine life, dancing together! It is a dance to which all of us are invited. The dancing around us is a sign of our final vocation. We should take our dancing more seriously. Once Jesus complained, “We piped for you a tune and you would not dance.” (Luke 7:32)