Easter 7C (John 17:20-26)

​Oneness or unity is the focus of Jesus’ prayer in the gospel lesson today. Jesus’ understanding of this oneness begins with being one with the Father. He then invites his disciples, friends, and future followers like us to join in the oneness he shares with the Father. So he says, “you in me, I in you, and they in us,” or “as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one.” In this oneness, love is always present.

While Jesus’ prayer for oneness sounds like a poem, let’s bring it down to earth from its heavenly realm. What is this oneness? How do you understand it? To sharpen our questions:

What does this oneness entail in our daily lives?
How do we actually become one with the triune God?
I want us to imagine a choreographed dance movement to get a sense of what this oneness might look like. When I was a teenager, breakdancing was quite popular. I tried and wasn’t very good. I wasn’t stiff—but the opposite. I was too loose. It was quite challenging for me to make my movements more controlled. No robot dance for me! But there’s one dance move I still remember and can actually demonstrate. It’s the Macarena dance I learned in the 90s. Can you believe even Theodore, who is now eight years old, knows how to do it?

While Theo and I were trying to dance together, we had to make sure we got the order right: which hand goes first, which direction to move, and so on. When we both agreed on the steps, we were able to dance as a team—as one. There was a sense of harmony in us. What makes this one movement in two individuals so satisfying and even joyful is that we’re not the same people, but two different agents, synchronizing in one action. There’s beauty in that.

This dance analogy isn’t something new to our Christian tradition. The Church Fathers used the term perichoresis. Peri-, the prefix, means “around” as in perimeter, and chōreō means “to go” or “to come.” So together, perichoresis is “to come around”—as though choreographed, like dancing around together. The movement of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit is the divine dance in oneness.

Now, let’s return to the first two questions I raised before. What does this oneness entail in our daily lives? And how do we actually become one with the triune God? One simple answer to both of these questions is: let’s do some Macarena with God. But not just the version of the Macarena we know so well—a divine version, patterned by God’s very own breath. Just as it’s important to choreograph which hand or leg moves first with my dance partner, breathing together is just as important. My dance partner and I need to communicate that we’ll also breathe in harmony—inhaling and exhaling together.

We pattern our breath with the Breath of God to be one. Get used to how you’re breathing. Increase your awareness of breath. How are you breathing when you’re at peace? When you’re upset, angry, annoyed, happy, relaxed, or excited? Notice how you breathe—and go for an even keel. The more aware you are of your own breath, the more you become aware of God’s breath in you. These are the skills to master so that we can dance together in God’s presence.

One thing to note: this oneness doesn’t erase your sense of self. It doesn’t negate you. You become a more skillful—or a better—version of yourself out of the many selves in you. The kind of oneness where you no longer exist is uniformity—or to put it more explicitly, spiritual fascism, in which you do not matter. The divine oneness is beautiful because it dances in harmony. Only in that mutual indwelling—only through the act of love, amor fati—do we become fully who we are meant to be in the eyes of God.

So, shall we dance?