6th Sunday of Easter – 23 May 2022
One of my interests is choreography – not that I know very much about it, but I certainly enjoy watching productions of dance and motion. Perhaps this is because my parents were enthusiastic dancers and one of my most delightful memories as a child was watching them dancing.
One of the most poignant dances I have seen is that of the Turkish whirling dervishes. This is a sacred dance with its very particular choreography. It begins with very slow motion and gradually builds with intensity so that the many individuals who enter the dance inter-weave their steps to create an extraordinary circular effect. It is one of the most sublime forms of dance that I have seen. The whirling dervishes derive their choreography from much earlier forms of dance in the middle east, particularly known as the round dance.
One of the very early Christian writers of the 2nd century, Hippolytus, who was the author of what we know now as the Second Eucharistic Prayer, saw in this dance a wonderful image of the very nature of God.
“O thou leader of the mystic round-dance! O divine Pasch and new feast of all things! O cosmic festal gathering! O joy of the universe, honour, ecstasy, exquisite delight by which dark death is destroyed . . . and the people that were in the depths arise from the dead and announce to all the hosts of heaven: ‘The thronging choir from earth is coming home.’”[1]
In this remarkable passage, Hippolytus is portraying the Risen Jesus as the leader of a divine dance which in its wonderful circular energy is sweeping us up into itself.
The Risen Jesus leads us into an eternal circular dance which, intimated by the choreography of the whirling dervishes, is a circle of communion. By the Risen Lord we are opened to a divine circle of relationship, a communion of life. Another early Christian writer John Damascene in the 8th century speaks of the divine perichoresis.[2] It is the technical word that he uses to describe the way in which in this divine circle of life each person finds themselves with the other, from the other, through the other, by the other, in the other. It all speaks of the nature of relationship in the very being of God. God is pure relationship, and we who are made in the image of this God, find ourselves in and through relationships. We exist in relationship or not at all. This is our truth because it is the very truth of God, and the more we are oriented towards relationship the more human we become, the more we are open to that which is divine; the less relational we are the less human we become and equally the more we find ourselves turned away from the divine life.
It is the role of the Spirit of Jesus now to lead us into this circle of life, and this communion of relationship. It means that we are held and entertained in a divine embrace, and this is the source of both our peace and our hope. The Risen Jesus gives us his peace. The peace that he gives us is own experience of being in such a communion of life. As the late Pope Paul VI once wrote, “If Jesus radiates such peace, such assurance, such happiness, such availability, it is by reason of the inexpressible love by which he knows that he is loved by his Father.”[3] It is the knowledge of this love that he now gives us in the Spirit so that we too might know peace.
In this sense, we realise that Christian peace, like Christian joy, is not simply a feeling. Experiencing the peace that Christ gives us does not mean that we will not feel stress or troubled. Experiencing the joy that Christ gives us does not mean that we feel happy all the time. Rather, it means that in the midst of our troubles, and even in the midst of our sadness, we know that we are held and embraced. And knowing that we are held and embraced in a communion of life and of love gives us a sureness of ground so that at all times we know we are more than our difficulties and our sadness. This is the nature of peace in Jesus, and it is the peace that he wishes us to experience also.
Like the choreography of the whirling dervishes this might all sound a little esoteric. However, it is precisely this appreciation that we are sustained in a communion of relationship which lays behind our Catholic response to social developments. This weekend we gather with disappointment at new NSW legislation for voluntary assisted dying. This legislation will now enable people to have their own life ended, albeit with a conditions and safeguards, none of which seem particularly safe or robust to protect those who are most vulnerable.
What is at heart in this debate is how we experience the reality of terminal illness, suffering and death. From a non-Christian viewpoint, we are autonomous individuals entitled to a life in which we have the right to an independence from the prospect of suffering. From this perspective suffering is seen as a failure to be overcome in the quickest and most expeditious way possible. This, however, is not the Catholic perspective. Whilst we do not look for suffering, and whilst we work with great energy to alleviate suffering, we know that suffering is part of what it means to be human, and that death is not a failure that we must anaesthetize. From our Catholic perspective it is not the sanitisation of suffering and death that renders us free, but rather it is the experience of care and of relationship in the midst of our suffering and in the face of our death that discloses to us not only the truth of ourselves but also the undeniable beauty of our humanity. Euthanasia is a failure of humanity because it strips us of the way in which our humanity discloses itself most powerfully precisely in the experience of care and companionship. It is in our commitment to one another in the midst of our suffering, not in our eradication of each other, that brings to the fore the light and the beauty of our nature most powerfully, and that yes, redeems a situation of darkness into one of light, and a situation of despair into one of hope.
The gospel this Sunday speaks of the communion of life which is both our origin and our destiny. It speaks of this circle of relationship into which we are being drawn by the Spirit of Jesus as the very basis for our peace and our joy. May it also be the source of our resolve to be the bearers of a care and companionship where people suffer most so that we might celebrate, rather than diminish our humanity. It is in the celebration of our care for one another in our vulnerability, rather than in our dismissal of each other, that we will know the peace that is in God’s own very life itself.
[1] See Hippolytus, Homiliae in Pascha, 6 [G 59, 744D, f.], quoted in Hugo Rahner, Man at Play: Or did you ever practice eutrapelia? translated by Brian Battershaw and Edward Quinn, (London: Burns & Oates, 1965), 86. Hippolytus also refers to the cosmic circular dance in his Refutation of All Heresies, Book V, ch. 21. For the images of God as dance in early Christian literature see also Ronald Gagne, Thomas Kane and Robert VerEecke, Introducing Dance in Christian Worship, (Washington, D.C.: The Pastoral Press, 1984), 38-41.
[2] “The subsistences dwell and are established firmly in one another. For they are inseparable and cannot part from one another, but keep to their separate courses within one another, without coalescing or mingling, but cleaving to each other. For the Son is in the Father and the Spirit: and the Spirit in the Father and the Son: and the Father in the Son and the Spirit, but there is no coalescence or commingling or confusion And there is one and the same motion: for there is one impulse and one motion of the three subsistences, which is not to be observed in any created nature.” John Damascene, Orthodox Faith, 1:14.
[3] Paul VI, Gaudete in Domino: On Christian Joy, Apostolic Exhortation, (9 May, 1975).
