Trinity Sunday
The Dance: A Reflection by C. S. Lewis
In Christianity God is not a static thing – not even in person – but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance. The union between the Father and Son is such a live concrete thing that this union itself is also a Person. I know this is almost inconceivable, but look at it thus. You know that among human beings, when they get together in a family, or a club, or a trade union, people talk about its “spirit” because the individual members, when they are together, do really develop particular ways of talking and behaving which they would not have if they were apart. It is as if a sort of communal personality came into existence. Of course, it is not a real person: it is only rather like a person. But that is just one of the differences between God and us. What grows out of the joint life of the Father and Son is a real Person, is in fact the Third of the three Persons who are God.
This third Person is called, in technical language, the Holy Spirit, or the “spirit” of God. Do not be worried or surprised if you find it (or Him) rather vaguer or more shadowy in your mind than the other two. I think there is a reason why that must be so. In the Christian life you are not usually looking at Him: He is always acting through you. If you think of the Father as something “out there,” in front of you, and the Son as someone at your side, helping you to pray, trying to turn you into another son, then you have to think of the third Person as something inside you, or behind you. Perhaps some people might find it easier to begin with the third Person and work backwards. God is love, and that love works through men – especially through the whole community of Christians. But this spirit of love is, from all eternity, a love going on between Father and Son. And now, what does it all matter? It matters more than anything else in the world. The whole dance, or drama, or pattern of this three-Personal life is to be played out in each one of us: or (putting it the other way round) each one of us has got to enter that patten, take his place in that dance. There is no other way to the happiness for which we were made.
– from Mere Christianity, by C. S. Lewis
God the Father, God beyond us – we adore you.
You are the depth of all that is.
You are the ground of our being.
We can never grasp you, yet you grasp us;
the universe speaks of you to us, and your love comes to us through Jesus.
God the Son, God beside us – we adore you.
You are the perfection of humanity.
You have shown us what human life should be like.
In you we see divine love and human greatness combined.
God the Spirit, God around us – we adore you.
You draw us to Jesus and the Father.
You are power within us.
You give abundant life and can make us the men and women we are meant to be.
Father, Son and Spirit;
God beyond, beside, and around us;
We adore you.
– Caryl Micklem
