Anyone who has seen the film Zorba the Greek will remember this scene. It happens toward the end.
“Teach me to dance,” says Basil, broken by failure. Basil is a young, reserved English writer who has set out to Crete to claim a small inheritance.
Zorba, smiling, opens his arms to the sea. “Dance?” he replies, his eyes shining. “C’mon, my boy.”
As the zither plucks that familiar tune, Zorba snaps his fingers and begins slowly to dance. Basil joins him, and soon they are whirling and kicking sand.
By the fourth century, Eastern theologians had found a metaphor to describe how God’s energy works: perichoresis. We can loosely translate the word as “circling around” — and it is the root of our own word “choreography.”
These theologians — including Gregory of Nyssa, Basil of Caesarea, and Gregory Nazianzen — had turned to a word from Greek theatre. Perichoresis means circle dance.
Modern Greeks still use the same word for their ancient folk dance.
In perichoresis, the dancers join hands and move in a circle, stepping faster and faster as the music speeds up. Watching from the sidelines, bystanders can no longer see individual dancers — only the moving energy of the whole circle.
Searching for a metaphor to describe God’s nature and activity, the Eastern theologians looked at perichoresis and said, “That’s what the Trinity is like.”
This was the word they used to describe the foundational quality of God’s character: relationship and communion.
In the beginning is relationship. In the beginning is movement. In the beginning is dance.
As we celebrate the feast of Trinity Sunday, maybe our simple chorus to our Triune God is, as it was on the beach for Basil, “Teach me to dance!”
