The Dance Within God

Every Christian has felt the tension, the ache of living in a world both redeemed and rebellious, luminous and fallen. Permixtum saeculum. We live between the Cross and the Kingdom. Ideologies clammer to offer quick resolutions that deny the wounding of nature, the gratuity of grace, and the rights of God and His Church. What if the key to living in that tension isn’t found in pre-written political agendas, but in the very heart of God made manifest in His faithful ones?

Perichoresis is the mutual indwelling of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, it’s the eternal dance of love that clarifies God’s life. Appreciating the mystery of God’s inmost life informs us about how He desires to work in  creation and communicate His life (CCC 236). Each Person fully inhabits the others without confusion or collapse. Distinct yet united, they live entirely for one another. This is not abstract theology but reality itself, offering a model for everything else: Christ’s incarnation, Mary’s maternity, the Church’s life, and our own mission. Inasmuch as God’s inner life illuminates our minds and shapes our prudence, we can sanctify the temporal order with our lives.

Through perichoresis we glimpse the mysteries of grace with a potent analogy. In Christ, divinity and humanity are wed, not by domination or dilution, but by communion. In Mary and the Church, divine love overflows into creation, binding heaven and earth in a shared maternity that gives birth to grace across generations. Mary’s fiat, “let it be to me according to your word,” is the Church’s heartbeat and ours. This fiat is the interior form of communio, the fundamental difference between how the Christian and the pagan act in the world.

The logic of perichoresis runs through the entire cosmos once we grasp that all is redeemed as gift from Father, in the Son, by the Spirit, through the Church. It is the rhythm of grace in a world that resists it. Yet we often prefer coercion or domination, reducing power extremes instead of witnessing how God’s mystery transcends our feeble senses. Perichoresis teaches us how to be present without absorbing, distinct without withdrawing, to love without domination. Mission, then, is not conquest or expansion of the will to power but learning to move to the Trinitarian rhythm, a different drum than the solutions peddled in podcasts. Like the leaven in the wheat, Christians are to indwell the world as God indwells creation: in love, patience, and self-giving communion.

In an age obsessed with winning, perichoresis offers a radical alternative. It is not unreasonable, for God’s innermost life comes is revealed in Jesus’ paschal mystery. God’s mysteries are, what Bishop Barron calls, “on the far side of reason.” If we truly believe, we must let our faith shape how we build the world including our societies. Paragraph 234 of the Catechism teaches,

The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is the central mystery of Christian faith and life… It is therefore the source of all the other mysteries of faith… It is the most fundamental and essential teaching in the ‘hierarchy of the truths of faith’. The whole history of salvation is identical with the history of the way and the means by which the one true God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, reveals himself to men ‘and reconciles and unites with himself those who turn away from sin.’

The Church’s task is not to escape the world but to let the dance of the Trinity move through it, sanctifying the ordinary until it becomes luminous again at the return of Christ the King. This requires that our vision be shaped by the paschal mystery. I mean something like J.R.R. Tolkien’s concept of sub-creation, we need to let the little worlds in which we occupy (first in our own heads!), our spheres of influence, bring forth the restoration of Trinitarian love. We are building a world within one already created and bought with a price. Our minds must be storehouses of the truths of salvation history which will ultimately be surer guides as we deliberate matters of prudence, especially politics.

This is why the Cristeros, in all their complexity, are a true witness of a Catholic political spirit that needs to be nurtured. They fought and resisted out of natural love for Mexico and would not surrender the gifts of the Church. Not simply buildings, but primarily the sacramental life itself. They knew that  Catholicism elevates and infuses society; it does not destroy it. Everything true, good, and beautiful is lifted up in Jesus Christ.

Sofia Cavalleti wrote about the particularly Christian approach to being in history in History of the Kingdom of God,

We are familiar with many histories connected to the rise and fall of many peoples, which are limited in time and confined to the boundaries of specific countries. In contrast to these histories, the history of salvation is the history of all peoples and of each person. Its origin stems from the creation of the world. Indeed, there was always present in the mind of God a plan that would unfold in time. Through its realization, people would come to the fullness of life. Differing from the histories of the peoples, which have a beginning, arrive at a point of greatest glory, and then inevitably decline and are replaced by other peoples and civilizations, sacred history follows a progressive development. From creation it is marked by stages that are always ascending toward redemption, in which the divine world and the human world are united in a human being, Jesus of Nazareth.

Whatever becomes of America, we ought not to lose the plot amidst wars, rumors of wars, and the malaise of sin. We must place our hearts in the Sacred Heart, keep our hands within Mary’s, and let the art of the possible be subordinate to the seemingly impossible reality of Trinitarian love poured out in history.

In this article we explored the divine pattern of abundant life, in the next we will consider the human stage where this pattern is performed or rejected: the mixed world.