A Word from Joel - June 18, 2025

“When [the Lord] marked out the foundations of the earth,
then I was beside him, like a master worker,
and I was daily his delight,
   playing before him always,
playing in his inhabited world
   and delighting in the human race.” Proverbs 8:29-31

This past week, we celebrated Trinity Sunday, the only Sunday of the year given specifically to a doctrine of the Christian faith. If Trinity means anything, it means that God’s life is not static but social. When God created the heavens and the earth, lady wisdom was there playing and delighting in humanity. While the Proverbs reading isn’t close to a fully-fledged doctrine of the Trinity, passages like this invite us to see God not as solitary but as communal. The Trinity teaches us that God has never been alone but is “a society of love” as St. Augustine put it. As Father, Son and Holy Spirit, God is relationship itself, one of unity and plenitude. If we are made in the image of this God, it is fitting that our deepest longing is for relationship and connection to others.

The early church fathers and mothers had a word to describe the relationship of love between Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and the word is perichoresis. We usually translate it as mutual indwelling, but it literally means dance around. “Peri” means around, and from “choresis” we get the word choreography. God then is a never-ending dance of divine love, where each member is moving, making space for the other, in a circle of flowing generosity and inclusion. If this is how God is in God’s own life, then it makes all the sense in the world that our lives will not be complete until we learn to move with flowing generosity and inclusion as well.

When we were in New Orleans, we visited Congo Square on Sunday afternoon. Congo Square is located in Louis Armstrong Park in what used to be black part of town. Before that it was where the Houmas Indians gathered for their annual corn festival and was considered sacred ground. By the middle of the 1700s, it became a marketplace where slaves gathered on Sunday. As a staunchly Catholic city, New Orleans observed the Sabbath for everyone. Unlike anywhere else in the South, slaves in New Orleans had one day free from their masters, and they gathered in Congo Square to dance and to drum.

People still gather in Congo Square every week at 3pm to dance, to sing, to celebrate, and to honor those who came before them. Last week, we were there to witness it. After a beautiful introduction by Rev. Denise Graves, a circle of drums began playing, and people entered that circle to dance. As guests, we came to observe, not to participate. But after a while, Rev. Denise approached us, took us by the hands and invited us into the circle to join the dance. So, we did. While I’m not much of a dancer, in that moment, on that sacred ground, I glimpsed both who God is and why we are here. God’s own life is a circle dance of love, constantly moving and making space for others, flowing generosity and inclusion. We will never feel complete unless we do the same. 

Beloved, our time here is short. We are not here to show off or to control each other. We are here to participate in a divine love that is so much larger than ourselves, a love that sees both the humanity and the divinity in everyone, a love that invites us in, a love that dances. Come, join the dance!