Dancing with Hannah, Raven and the Trinity: Finding faith in movement
A weekly dance class for people with Parkinson’s disease, a Tlingit story about Raven and a Trinity Sunday sermon converge in this reflection on community, creation and the dance that connects them all.
By Walter Hesford | FāVS News Columnist
The views expressed in this opinion column are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views of FāVS News.
Every Thursday morning my wife and I dance with Hannah. It is the highlight of our Paradise Creek of Olympus week.
Hannah, a professional dancer, offers dance exercise classes specifically for people with Parkinson’s disease but open to all. For 25 years, such classes have proven to improve participants’ quality of life.
Paradise Creek residents come to the central dining hall by wheelchair, walker and walking stick to join in the dance. As we sit or stand, we stretch backs and necks, arms and hands, and legs and feet to well-chosen music. Hannah convinces us that we are doing some version of an actual dance such as a jig or the flamenco.
Most impressively, Hannah gets all involved, even those with very limited mobility, even those who have had a stroke, and can’t otherwise communicate. At the end she has us form a circle in which we commune with each other through gestures and laughter.
Sometimes Hannah suggests we imagine ourselves to be some sort of animal. So when one day she had us reach down with our arms, shape our hands so they could hold a ball, then toss that ball into the sky, I imagined myself to be Raven, the trickster hero of several Pacific Northwest Indigenous nations, who tosses the sun into the sky after stealing it from an old man who had held it captive in a box. Thus Raven brings light to the world.
Becoming Raven
I first heard the “Raven Steals the Sun” story from a Tlingit guide on a Southeast Alaska cruise. Every day I gaze at a Tlingit artistic rendition of this story we have in our dining room. Though I cannot understand this story in a way that a Tlingit can, I can enjoy and admire the way it invites us to participate in the dance of our animal relatives that keeps our world moving.
I have not felt that the stories of my own Christian tradition invite me to this dance or to any dance for that matter, even though there is ample evidence that dance has been integral to this tradition, as Nick Gier proves in his FāVS News column, “Jesus as Lord of the Dance: Historical and biblical roots of dancing in Christianity.”
Throughout Hebrew Scripture there are examples of joyous dancing and, as Gier points out, it is very likely that Mary and her son Jesus enjoyed the festive dances of their culture.
Some medieval saints danced, and while most Reformers frowned on dancing, Luther, as Gier notes, did not. The Lutheran church in my experience is, however, pretty staid, only slightly swaying in their pews even when singing, “We are dancing in the light of God.”
It wasn’t until this year’s Trinity Sunday, May 31, that I understood how Christian tradition can have us dancing in a way that bears comparison with dancing with Hannah and Raven.
A revelation on Trinity Sunday
In liturgical churches, Trinity Sunday celebrates the divine unity of the creator God, of the human one, Jesus, and of the Holy Spirit. My pastor acknowledged that often the Trinity is presented as a theological mystery and as a source of controversy — is it or is it not biblical?
In her sermon, however, she showed how the creator, Jesus and the inspiring, sustaining Spirit are in relationship and offer us opportunities for establishing relationships with, and of being in communion with, the divine, the world and each other.
The opening Scripture reading for Trinity Sunday is the entire creation story in Genesis. My brother, a retired Lutheran minister, says that ongoing, holistic creation is the dance to which we are invited. Our closing hymn for this Sunday, “Come, Join the Dance of Trinity,” continued the invitation.
So we have available in Christian tradition a dance that, like Raven’s, relates us to the world, and like Hannah’s, creates a community.
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