Remember those horrible junior high/middle school dances? The boys were lined up on one side and the girls on the other. The time was filled with awkward episodes of giggling and running back-and-forth to the bathroom, drama and tears. I myself remember one dance in particular where I felt so alone despite a large number of other kids around. Few of us enter adulthood without at least one painful incident of feeling awkward or left out.
“Isolation in community” is descriptive not only of tweens and teens but of many adults as well. We may be surrounded by a great crowd and yet feel completely alone. Sometimes this happens because we have been burned by churches, in marriages, by friends. We hone a survival instinct that would make the Lone Ranger proud and vow to “go it alone from now on.”
We keep ourselves protected by a wall of separation that few can penetrate. 
Yet, God is one-in-three, a perpetual community of perfect love and harmony. God invites us to “come, join the dance of Trinity,” as the hymn says. God-as-Three calls us away from the wall of our isolation into a joyful dance of relationship with God and others.
Sometimes, learning to enter that dance includes the need for a “dancing instructor,” otherwise known as a spiritual director or spiritual mentor. They can help us overcome the wounds from past attempts at “dancing,” and learn the simple, life-changing steps of the Trinity. With their help we realize that this dance has room for everyone and that there is no shame, no awkwardness, only love and acceptance within a joyful community. Like a healing centrifugal force, this dance spins out our pain and sorrow, leaving the pure gold of our True Self. Our souls are restored, as Psalm 23 promises.
Come! Join the dance of Trinity.
Valerie Hess, our guest blogger today, is an author, teacher, speaker and musician. You can find her on this website where she finds creative ways to live into the intersection of the Arts and the Body with Spiritual Formation.
Valerie, thanks for sharing some dance steps with us here at CenterQuest! This sounds so delightfully Orthodox. They love to speak of the “eternal dance of Creation.” Part of our theosis is the unending pursuit of dance proficiency with the Trinity, who has an eternity of practice getting down the steps of love in a dance of perpetual union and grace. So much better than those awkward High School dances when we even avoided eye contact, the very thing that could start us busting out moves to end our loneliness and isolation!
Thanks, Rob. This whole idea of the dance of the Trinity is becoming an important message to me personally. It is helping me understand faith is not knowledge but knowing.
Valerie, what a delight to see you blog for us at CenterQuest on such an important topic. Thanks for coming on board and sharing your insights to us!
Thanks for the invitation!
Valerie what you say is so seminal to the soul’s journey. Whether married, single, rich, poor, monk, happy, sad…
“We may be surrounded by a great crowd and yet feel completely alone”.
I love your image of the Trinity here. It is about relational union. It is about finding the gaze of God in each other. I find spiritual direction to be one of the most opportune paths toward true life, true self and the true God in it all. Thank you!
You are welcome. If we are not in community with others, I believe we need to examine our faith. God is a community all by God-self. Why do we think we can “go it alone”?!
Amen. So we have the answer. Now, the road to deep and meaningful community is another story (…it’s that arduous lonely corner of meaningful community that makes SD so sweet!)
hi valerie — thanks for this. can you send a link to the hymn you refer to? i’ve never heard of it and would like to!
shukran!