When I first encountered the reality of racism, head on, I was maybe a sophomore or junior in high school. I mean, I’d learned about slavery, I’d learned about the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King, Jr. I’d learned about how our country was founded and about Manifest Destiny and the Trail of Tears and the smallpox blankets long before that day. But it was all theoretical. It was all in the past, it was history, after all, so it certainly wasn’t my problem anymore. And it was all interpreted from a certain point of view, so that the ends justified the means, so that even though we have these horrors in our past, we just need to look at the amazing country that we’ve built in spite of it.
It was never made clear to me that we’d built this country to be the way that it is because of those means. But one day in high school, we took the whole day, they cancelled classes, they rearranged schedules, and they had us all watch this documentary called The Color of Fear. It was an eyeopening dive into the reality that we live in a white world, that the structures of our society are set up so that white folks, as a whole, have more power, more prestige, more money, and more choices than people of color. Well, I watched this documentary, I confronted my own privilege, and I just lost it. I basically threw a sobbing temper tantrum in Ms. Haffley’s English Composition classroom.
I freaked out all my friends. What about me? I asked. What about those of us who have to live with the reality that we are the oppressors? What about reverse racism and sexism and how my family has struggled and how I’m not that privileged and I haven’t specifically, directly oppressed anyone, after all, I’m just a kid!?
I was looking for exoneration. I was looking for absolution. I was looking for all the wrong things. And as I paced and cried and sat down and got up again and asked all the wrong questions and said all the wrong things, Ms. Haffley sat and listened, she held the space for me, she let me feel what I had to feel.
And as I paced and cried and sat down and got up again and asked all the wrong questions, my friend, Rasheed, challenged me, he kept at me, he redirected my questions and called me out on my self-centeredness. He described his world to me. He was the class president and the wrestling captain and the top student in our grade. But he was still scared to drive his car at night. He was still afraid to visit his friends in the rich white suburbs and was still the only one in history class who took on parts of Black history for his independent project. He still had to be the black “representative,” speaking for all the other blacks in his predominantly white school.
He sacrificed a lot that day, as I wept in that classroom. He gave me his time, his focus, his thoughtfulness, his stories and his perspective. All so that I might understand, even just a little, about how racism is part of the air I breathe, and that I, too, am a racist, even when I try my hardest not to be. But Ms. Haffley and Rasheed were present for me anyway. They stayed with me, simultaneously challenging and comforting me, until I wore myself out. I went home with salt on my sleeves and just a tiny seed of understanding.
That was day one. Day one of step one of the beginnings of just the start of my realization about the insidious nature of racism. Oof. And I’ve made some big mistakes. I’ve said the wrong things and I’ve not paid attention and I’ve tuned out and overlooked and ignored.
I’d have, and I still have, a long way to go. It felt, and it still feels, like this concept that I’ll never fully understand, never fully “get,” never fully have a handle on, and never really know how to “fix.” Boy, don’t we just want to know how to fix things so that we can just move on? Don’t we wish we just had the answers so that we could be sure and confident and “right?” We humans don’t like being wrong. We want to be in control. We want to have all the answers.
We want to have it all figured out so that we don’t have to live in the grey of uncertainty. But there is no certainty. There is only The Dance.
My biggest challenge in Seminary wasn’t parsing Greek verbs or memorizing the maps of the Ancient Near East. It wasn’t avoiding a certain homophobic professor in the halls. And it wasn’t the listening to twenty-two year olds talk about the “right way to do a funeral” and “how to talk to someone who is grieving” as they walked back to their dorm rooms.
Nope. It was the Trinity.
The frickin’ Trinity.
If you’ve ever read some Aristotle or Plato or any kind of philosophy and then turned around to read a text of theology, it can be truly maddening. Philosophy has nice clear lines. Boundaries and definitions. Rules. Logic. In philosophy, you need rational proofs, building blocks upon which to decipher the meaning of reality or our very existence or whether the poets should be banished from the Republic.
In theology, you also need rational proofs, building blocks upon which to decipher the existence of God or the nature of the Good or the existence of evil. Building blocks of rational proofs as far as reason can take those theologians, and then, the big jump.
They end up in a rational dead end and then suddenly, “it’s all a mystery,” “this is where you need faith,” or “this is what the Nicene fathers said, so it must be true.”
And reading about the Trinity is the. worst.
The theologians will write on and on with all the greek and the pages of words and the footnotes. They’ll talk about the three in one and the one in three. They’ll use big words like perichoresis and hypostasis. One God in three persons, consubstantial in person, nature, essence and will. But also separate and distinct in and of themselves. Co-equal. Co-powerful. They write about the heresies of modalism and Sabellianism and Arianism.
They use analogies like water and ice and steam, or the head, body and feet of a river, or a god “powerpack” that descends from the heavens, entirely God, but somehow suffused into a human body. They argue about the co-existence of the Son or the adoptionist theory that Jesus was made by God and then adopted in to God’s self. They argue about whether hypostasis means “essence” or “person.” And when they reach a dead end, when they start talking in circles and hiding their logical fallacies, after all the pages and the greek and the footnotes and the Fathers, they say, “it’s a mystery.” “You must have faith.”
I was basically told that I was not welcome at the Seminary after I had been prying the professor for some logical explanation of the Trinity. How can a simple being be both three and one? What’s the point if they have the same essence, or person, or will, or power? What is the nature of being, anyway? Is this ontologically so? How do can anyone know this?
I argued, “you can’t just use the rules of philosophy as far as is convenient and then dump it all once you reach a dead end and then call it “faith.”
“Maybe you just don't belong here” the professor said.
And I was also jealous because it didn’t seem like anyone else had such a struggle.
And I was angry because there were people walking around who claimed to know the very essence of God. Who claimed to know what God is and how God works and “here, let me just draw you a Venn diagram to show you.” “Or, it’s like this three-leaf clover. Or, look, it’s simple, just check out this trinitarian shield I drew for you.”
God from God, Light from Light, True God from true God, one in being with the Father as the Nicene Creed professes.
Honestly, it still doesn’t make any “sense.”
And then I learned about this crazy theory — just a theory — of what this fancy word “perichoresis” might mean. I was cramming for my ordination exams, trying to learn all the things I should have learned in seminary, trying to ingest all the things I was supposed to believe. And in a basic primer on Christian Doctrine, called…Christian Doctrine, it said this: the word “perichoresis” literally means “dancing around.” Shirley Guthrie says, “The oneness of God is not the oneness of a distinct, self-contained individual; it is the unity of a community of persons who love each other and live together in harmony. And personal means, by definition, inter-personal; one cannot be truly personal alone but only in relation to other persons. Such is the unity and personal character of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. …
There is a deep, intimate, indissoluble unity between them. … They are what they are only in relationship to each other.”
Essentially, the very essence of God is one of community. Relationship. A dancing together. An existence based upon the existence of the other. So then the “other” isn’t so “other” anymore. The boundaries between Jesus and God and Spirit get all blurry because the need for each other is so great that they lose themselves in one another, only to gain themselves by doing so. I can jive with the idea that we have no clue what or who God is, but that at the very heart of God is relationship.
There’s so much we don’t know. We can never know. But, what if, at the heart of God is community?
Wouldn’t that change everything?
Suddenly we are experiencing a tiny piece of God, we are participating in an act that is at the very heart of who God is when we need each other. When we struggle in community. When we catch each other’s colds and clean the community bathrooms and sing together on a cold Sunday morning. When we dip some bread in some juice. When we listen to the stories of those who have been oppressed and abused. When we take the time to really hear the cries of the mothers who have lost their sons to police violence. When we take some responsibility for that, just because we’ve benefited from a system that has been set up to do just that.
I am not me without you. We have mutual need. A need for community that is so intense that it blurs the lines that separate us and suddenly we’re all wrapped up in each other. We are what we are only in relationship to each other.
And that’s the nature of God. Each time we dance with each other, each time we try to dance, or try to listen or try to understand those whose experiences are not like ours, we’re doing the work of God.
Perichoresis isn’t three guys sipping tea together up on a cloud somewhere. It’s intense participation in the lives of the other. So intense, that the other isn’t so other any more. The person who we think is our complete opposite is actually us. Suddenly, the boundary between God and humans get so blurry that God comes to us as one of us. God, in relationship to Jesus and the Holy Spirit, in a dance with Jesus and the Holy Spirit, to such an extent that wherever one is, so are the others. So that Jesus could come to us, and we could experience the very nature of God.
The essence of God is one of participation and relationship.
And that’s why we do church. Because when we participate, when we are in these messy relationships with each other, we are doing what God does. We’re dancing. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll see a tiny glint of the relational heart of God in this mess of a community. That’s why we’re called to listen to the voices that have been suppressed in the past. That’s why we see the individual, the person, the unique situation, we listen to the unique story. Because you are a unique person, with unique situations and a unique story, invited to dance with others in their unique situations with their unique stories.
I think that’s what Rasheed and Ms. Haffley did for me that messy day in that English Composition classroom. They danced with me, they maintained relationship, they helped me understand the Other in a new way. They taught me to listen. They taught me to stay open. They taught me how to feel what I needed to feel, but not at the expense of another. They didn’t walk away. They didn’t give up. They danced. And somehow, something, something so very very tiny, but something, was mended, something was united, one tiny little chunk of the wall that divides us was torn down. There was baptism. There was incarnation. The presence of God was in that place. For just a second, God looked a little bit like a confused white girl, a struggling young black man, and an empathetic English teacher.
Let us do what the Trinity does.
Let us dance.
Thanks be to God.
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