It Takes Three To Tango

The Trinitarian basis for true friendship

This article is part of the Claritas fall 2022 issue, Mystery. Read the full print release here.

By Christopher Ho KiM

There is a dance studio on the corner of 193rd Street and 47th Avenue in my hometown of Auburndale, New York with a pink and black sign that reads “Dance Creations by Laurie.” The sign hangs above the door sagging out of old age, but the energy from inside rejuvenates the building with a constant flow of vibrance.

Every Sunday, on my way home from church, I would pass by that studio and catch glimpses of the elegant dancers. There was something about the pointe shoes, barres, and marley floors that mesmerized me week after week. And as time passed, my desire to dance grew.

I never had the courage to ask my parents for dance classes though. The financial obligations of being a performing artist was a contributing factor to that decision, but I also felt a social pressure to not engage with something that would be considered non-masculine. So I kept the chambers to my burning desire creaked open with the hope that the little oxygen I secretly gave it would keep it alive. But at the beginning of high school, that door shut.

My high school had “afternoon options” where students were able to choose how they wanted to spend two hours of every weekday, whether it be sports or some other activity. And because most of the school was a part of some team sport, I felt obligated to do one as well. But that was when my friend Avery* convinced me otherwise.

Avery was a cross-country runner whose dad was the head coach of the varsity soccer program. He was by all means an athlete. So when he approached me one night with the idea of joining the dance team for the spring season of afternoon options, I was surprised. Had he known about my obsession with dance? Maybe I had mentioned it once in our many late-night conversations?

As I sat on the dusty blue couch in the common room of our dorm, I expressed my concerns to him about joining the dance team: being labeled with stereotypes, making a fool of myself trying to learn for the first time, and the lack of men in the group to name a few. But the more I talked, the more he seemed convinced that we should do it together. Who cared about stereotypes? As long as we were confident in our identities, it wouldn’t matter. Who cared if we looked like fools? We were there to learn, and failing is a part of that journey. Who cared if there weren’t enough men? We could be the ones to bring more in. Avery encouraged me to at least try, and if I didn’t like it, I didn’t need to do it again. Through that conversation, he had opened the door in my heart and rekindled the dying embers. I ended up joining and absolutely loved it.

We became close friends that season. And as I reflected on my relationship with Avery, I realized that the reason we grew close wasn’t because we both hated and felt embarrassed in the fact that we were the only guys on the dance team. Instead, it was that we each had a love for dance, and our individual passions helped to fuel that of one another’s.

There is something very human about the ability to gather and develop relationships over shared passions or experiences— we in college especially have a tendency to do so. We bond with one another about the misery in prelims, the joy of getting a “class-cancelled” email, or our collective disdain for pre-enroll. When I first came to Cornell, I found myself asking questions about how I wanted to form my relationship. So I turned to the Bible, specifically the story of David and Jonathan, for guidance in how I sought them.

The story of David and Jonathan is one that I regard as the pinnacle of human friendship in the Old Testament. David was a shepherd boy from the town of Bethlehem who God had anointed through Samuel to become the second king of Israel. And Jonathan was the first-born son and heir to the throne of Saul, the first king of Israel. (In fact, Saul saw David as a threat to his kingdom and wanted to kill him out of jealousy.) Despite the circumstances, David and Jonathan were both men who loved the LORD, and the LORD was with them both.

1 Samuel describes their relationship in the following way: “the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul” [1]. The two made a covenant, and their relationship remained strong to the point where Jonathan risked his life for David in 1 Samuel 20:30-33 when David is a fugitive, running from Saul’s murderous hand. The covenant made in 1 Samuel 18:3 is shown again later on when Jonathan says, “ ‘May the LORD take vengeance on David’s enemies’ ” [2]. And they also make a covenant to look after each other’s descendants.

Then in 2 Samuel 1, David learns that Jonathan was killed in a battle against the Philistines, and he mourns the death of his beloved friend. He writes the following lamentation: “I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan;/ very pleasant have you been to me;/ your love was extraordinary,/ surpassing the love of women” [3].

Isn’t what David wrote surprising? Queer theorists argue that the aforementioned verses are a testament to some hidden erotic love between the two. But the non-existence of Biblical evidence for any romantic love between David and Jonathan and the unlikelihood of such a relationship lead me to believe that it was nothing more than a friendship.

And that is the beauty of David and Jonathan’s relationship. They were able to find true, deep-seated love for one another. A love so powerful and pure that causes people two millennia later to argue if they were homosexual. They were nothing but loyal to one another, each keeping their ends of the covenants they made together. (Jonathan saw to it that David inherited the throne, and David looked after Jonathan’s children when Jonathan passed away.)

So how did such a relationship form? It was because both men centered their lives on an eternal and divine relationship— the first and everlasting relationship in its most holy and pure form, the same relationship that actively affects our lives today, the one between God and Himself through the Trinity.

The Trinity refers to the single God who exists in three persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are not each a separate god, and God does not choose to take one form over another. Rather, they are three persons who exist in one being in perfect unity.

The holy relationship amongst the Trinity is described in Tim Keller’s King’s Cross: The Story of the World in the Life of Jesus as the Father, the Son, and the Spirit each centering on the others, adoring and serving each other as they infinitely seek one another’s glory. “[They] are characterized in their very essence by mutually self-giving love. No person in the Trinity insists that the others revolve around him; rather each of them voluntarily circles and orbits the others” [4]. It is the perfect dance, the perfect relationship, where they flow in harmony each simultaneously being the leader and the follower of the dance. And they are able to do so because God Himself is the perfect being.

Pretend that you are at a wedding where everyone but you has been dancing all night. Your friend notices that you’ve been sitting alone, not participating in any of the festivities. You explain to him that you don’t find joy in dancing because you’ve never danced before. You are afraid to dance in front of everyone. Regardless, he takes you by the hand and starts dancing with you. At first, you’re hesitant: you don’t know where or even what the beat is. But your friend always manages to make sure you’re having a good time, and more importantly, he doesn’t make you look like a fool. And at the end of the night, you are happy that you were able to dance with everyone else.

Likewise, when it comes to the divine dance of the Trinity, we are not to simply sit on the sidelines and be mere observers. Instead, we are to fully partake and learn the rhythms and intimacies of it— we were made to do so. More importantly, God cares about us and wants us to dance with Him. And we are to be in a constant dance with God. We are to center Him in all that we do for that will bring us true joy and happiness.

However, we are human. We are atrocious at dancing. We frequently lose our balance and get off rhythm. We mess up. But that is the beauty of being with the best dancer. God is able to catch our mistakes and pull us back in. He is able to make up for every lost step and get us back on the rhythm when we can’t hear the beat. As long as God is at the center of it all, as long as He is the one leading it all, we can trust that our dance with Him is harmonious, and we can trust that we are learning and doing the best that we can.

So how should our relationship with one another reflect our relationship with the Trinity?

As college students, we have a tendency to make a lot of our relationships self-centered. We look to others for what they are able to provide us— help with classes, access to parties, networking connections to name a few— and others do the same to us. And when we try to center our relationships on ourselves, we are teaching one another an imperfect dance.

Think about two people tangoing. Often there is a leader who leads with subtle gestures, and there is an understanding that the follower will follow them. Together, they are able to form an elegant dance. Now, what if the leader didn’t know what they were doing? Then, there would be an inability to coordinate their movements. This is what it looks like when we try to center our relationships around us. Because we don’t know how to dance perfectly, we have an incomplete knowledge of what the dance is supposed to look like. As we try to teach others to dance, those issues are then exacerbated. However, if we all learned from the same source, the truest source, then we would be able to dance better together. And we can see this in David and Jonathan’s mutual love and passion for God resulting in their stability with one another.

To the reader, there is a conflict in David and Jonathan’s relationship, and understandably so. David is the one who God anointed to take over the throne, and Jonathan is the one who is supposed to inherit the throne. If their relationship was reflective of many of ours today, a self-centered relationship, this conflict would have most likely resulted in a war for the throne. But because they both loved the Lord and put Him in the center of their lives, they understood God’s greater purpose. Jonathan was able to give up his right to the throne because he knew that God chose David, and he is able to admit to David in 1 Samuel 23:16, “ ‘You will be king over Israel, and I will be second to you.’ ” [5]. And that is how they formed such a strong relationship with one another. Each knew of the one true and eternal love, and it flowed from God to one another.

When we place God at the center of our lives, and when we first focus on our dance with Him, we are able to form self-sacrificing, soul-knitting, covenant-making relationships that help uplift others instead of ourselves. God is our teacher and our best dance partner. And if we acknowledge that, then all of our relationships will be closer to that of the Trinity. But, because we are not perfect, our relationships will not be perfect.

There will be times when we fail to place God at the center, so we fail to uplift one another, and instead we hurt each other. In those times, we must first reenter our lives in God. For it is only if we are in Christ, we can show the love and mercy that God had first shown us, and we will be able to forgive just as He taught us.

My relationship with Avery has by no means been perfect. There were times when we hurt each other. But our mutual passion for dance helped us to keep our relationship strong. And though we no longer physically dance together, the relationship we built from those four years is one that still lasts strong today.

So if our relationships can be fortified through temporary passions like dance, how much stronger would they be through everlasting ones?

This article appeared in Claritas’ fall 2022 Mystery Issue

SOURCES

* name changed for anonymity

[1] 1 Samuel 18:1 English Standard Version

[2] 1 Samuel 20:16 English Standard Version

[3] 2 Samuel 1:26 English Standard Version

[4] Keller, Timothy. King’s Cross: The Story of the World in the Life of Jesus. New York: Riverhead Books, 2011.

[5] 1 Samuel 23:16 English Standard Version

[6] Luke 17:3-4 English Standard Version