The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation by Richard Rohr, notes and references herein are from the kindle edition
We must—absolutely must—maintain a fundamental humility before the Great Mystery. If we do not, religion always worships itself and its formulations and never God.
The very mystical Cappadocian Fathers of fourth-century eastern Turkey eventually developed some highly sophisticated thinking on what we soon called the Trinity. It took three centuries of reflection on the Gospels to have the courage to say it, but they of this land—which included Paul of Tarsus before them and Mevlânâ Rumi of Konya afterward—circled around to the best metaphor they could find: Whatever is going on in God is a flow, a radical relatedness, a perfect communion between Three—a circle dance of love. And God is not just a dancer; God is the dance itself.
Brother Elias Marechal, a monk at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, Georgia: The ancient Greek Fathers depict the Trinity as a Round Dance: an event that has continued for six thousand years, and six times six thousand, and beyond the time when humans first knew time. An infinite current of love streams without ceasing, to and fro, to and fro, to and fro: gliding from the Father to the Son, and back to the Father, in one timeless happening. This circular current of trinitarian love continues night and day…. The orderly and rhythmic process of subatomic particles spinning round and round at immense speed echoes its dynamism.
Created by Russian iconographer Andrei Rublev in the fifteenth century, The Trinity is the icon of icons for many of us.
There’s green, easily representative of “the Spirit.” Hildegard of Bingen, the German Benedictine abbess, musical composer, writer, philosopher, mystic, and overall visionary, living three centuries before Rublev, called the Spirit’s endless fertility and fecundity veriditas—a quality of divine aliveness that makes everything blossom and bloom in endless shades of green.
The divine photosynthesis that grows everything from within by transforming light into itself—precisely the work of the Holy Spirit. Is that good or what? The Holy One in the form of Three—eating and drinking, in infinite hospitality and utter enjoyment between themselves.
If we take the depiction of God in The Trinity seriously, we have to say, “In the beginning was the Relationship.” This icon yields more fruits the more you gaze on it. Every part of it was obviously meditated on with great care: the gaze between the Three; the deep respect between them as they all share from a common bowl. And note the hand of the Spirit pointing toward the open and fourth place at the table! Is the Holy Spirit inviting, offering, and clearing space? If so, for what?
God is not seen as a distant, static monarch but—as we will explore together—a divine circle dance, as the early Fathers of the church dared to call it (in Greek perichoresis, the origin of our word choreography). God is the Holy One presenced in the dynamic and loving action of Three.
In other words, divine inclusion—again, what we rightly name salvation—was Plan A and not Plan B! Our final goal of union with God is grounded in creation itself, and also in our own unique creation.8 This was a central belief in my own spiritual formation as a Franciscan friar.9 Our starting place was always original goodness,10 not original sin. This makes our ending place—and everything in between—possessing an inherent capacity for goodness, truth, and beauty. Salvation is not some occasional, later emergency additive but God’s ultimate intention from the very beginning, even “written in our hearts.”11 Are you ready to take your place at this wondrous table? Can you imagine that you are already a part of the dance?
God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.12 My Father goes on working, and so do I.13 The Holy Spirit…will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.
A paradigm shift is tantamount to what religion often calls “major conversion.” And it is equally rare in both science and religion! Any genuine transformation of worldview asks for such a major switch from the track we’re familiar with that often those who hold the old paradigm must actually die off before a new paradigm can gain traction and wide acceptance. Even more shocking is Kuhn’s conclusion that a paradigm shift has little to do with logic or even evidence, and everything to do with cataclysmic insight and breakthrough. German mystic Meister Eckhart called this phenomenon “boiling”!
History has so long operated with a static and imperial image of God—as a Supreme Monarch who is mostly living in splendid isolation from what he—and God is always and exclusively envisioned as male in this model—created. This God is seen largely as a Critical Spectator (and his followers do their level best to imitate their Creator in this regard). We always become what we behold; the presence that we practice matters. That’s why we desperately need a worldwide paradigm shift in Christian consciousness regarding how we relate to God.
Instead of God being the Eternal Threatener, we have God as the Ultimate Participant—in everything—both the good and the painful. Instead of an Omnipotent Monarch, let’s try what God as Trinity demonstrates as the actual and wondrous shape of the Divine Reality, which then replicates itself in us17 and in “all the array” of creation.18
Instead of God watching life happen from afar and judging it… How about God being inherent in life itself? How about God being the Life Force of everything? Instead of God being an Object like any other object… How about God being the Life Energy between each and every object (which we would usually call Love or Spirit)? This allows God to be much larger, at least coterminous with the ever-larger universe we are discovering, and totally inclusive—what else could any God worthy of the name be? Instead of the small god we seem stuck with in our current (and dying) paradigm, usually preoccupied with exclusion, the Trinitarian Revolution reveals God as with us in all of life instead of standing on the sidelines, always critiquing which things belong and which things don’t. The Trinitarian Revolution reveals God as always involved instead of the in-and-out deity that leaves most of humanity “orphaned” much of the time.19 Theologically, of course, this revolution repositions grace as inherent to creation, not as an occasional additive that some people occasionally merit. If this revolution has always been quietly present, like yeast in the dough of our rising spirituality, it might help us understand the hopeful and positive “adoption” and “inheritance” theologies of Paul20 and the Eastern Fathers over the later, punitive images of God that have dominated the Western church. This God is the very one whom we have named “Trinity”—the flow who flows through everything, without exception, and who has done so since the beginning. Thus, everything is holy, for those who have learned how to see. The implications of this spiritual paradigm shift, this Trinitarian Revolution, are staggering: every vital impulse, every force toward the future, every creative momentum, every loving surge, every dash toward beauty, every running toward truth, every ecstasy before simple goodness, every leap of élan vital, as the French would say, every bit of ambition for humanity and the earth, for wholeness and holiness, is the eternally-flowing life of the Trinitarian God. Whether we know it or not! This is not an invitation that you can agree with or disagree with. It is a description of what is already happening in God and in everything created in God’s image and likeness. This triune God allows you, impels you, to live easily with God everywhere and all the time: in the budding of a plant, the smile of a gardener, the excitement of a teenage boy over his new girlfriend, the tireless determination of a research scientist, the pride of a mechanic over his hidden work under the hood, the loving nuzzling of horses, the tenderness with which eagles feed their chicks, and the downward flow of every mountain stream. This God is found even in the suffering and death of those very things! How could this not be the life-energy of God? How could it be anything else? Such a big definition of life must include death in its Great Embrace, “so that none of your labors will be wasted.”21 In the chirp of every bird excited about a new morning, in the hard beauty of every sandstone cliff, in the deep satisfaction at every job well done, in the passion of sex, and even in a clerk’s gratuitous smile to a department store customer or in the passivity of the hospital bed, “the world, life or death, the present or the future—all belong to you; [and] you belong to Christ and Christ belongs to God,” as the apostle Paul puts it.22 It is one Trinitarian Flow since the beginning.515
It is not about being obviously religious. We have tried that for centuries with small results; it’s about being quietly joyous and cooperative23 with the divine generosity that connects everything to everything else.556
God’s joyous unveiling as Trinity can melt even the most hardened constrictions, illuminating the way toward a fourfold re-union of Spirit, self, society, and sense of space.580
Catherine Mowry LaCugna’s heady book entitled God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life.604
I much more consciously enjoyed the flow that I now saw flowing everywhere.621
resonate with your own experience, so you can say, I know this—I’ve witnessed this to be true for myself. Because that’s the great moment in all divine revelation, when beautiful ideas drop in from head to heart, from the level of dogma to experience. When it’s not something that we merely believe, but in a real sense something that we know. This is my prayer: that the divine dance of God be something you know, and my words will not get in the way of it.626
Don’t start with the One and try to make it into Three, but start with the Three and see that this is the deepest nature of the One. This starting point, along with the contemplative mind to understand it, was much more emphasized and developed in the Eastern church,655
God is not a being among other beings, but rather Being itself revealed for any mature seeker.30 The God whom Jesus talks about, and includes himself in, is presented as unhindered dialogue, a totally positive and inclusive flow in one direction, and a waterwheel of outpouring love that never stops! St. Bonaventure would later call such a God a “fountain fullness” of love. Any talk of anger in God, “wrath” in God, unforgiveness in God, or any kind of holding back whatsoever, the Cappadocian mystics would see as theologically impossible and forever undone in a Trinitarian notion of God. Nothing human can stop the flow of divine love; we cannot undo the eternal pattern even by our worst sin. God is always winning, and God’s love will win. Love does not lose, nor does God lose. You can’t stop the relentless outpouring force that is the divine dance.661
when this Jesus is revealed to us Christians by calling himself the Son of the Father and yet one with the Father, he is giving clear primacy to relationship. Who you are is who you are in the Father, as he would put it.31 That is your meaning. “My self is God, nor is any other self known to me except my God,” Catherine of Genoa said.32689
We’re not of independent substance; we exist only in relationship. How countercultural! To the Western mind, relationship always looked like second or third best: “Who wants to just be a relationship? I want to be a self-made693
God is relationship itself. And don’t you see that? Have you ever met a holy person? They’re always people who can stay in relationship at all costs.701
“Richard, at the end of your life, you’ll realize that every mentally ill person you’ve ever worked with is basically lonely.”706
there are probably physical reasons for some mental illness, but loneliness is what activates it.”709
Every case of nonphysiologically-based mental illness stems from a person who has been separated, cut off, living alone, forgetting how to relate. This person does not know intimacy and is starved for communion. That’s probably why God created the sexual drive so strong in most of us. It’s an instinct that demands relationship in its healthy manifestation, because when you separate yourself from others you become sick, toxic, and—I’m going to say—even evil. I think we’re back again to this mystery of Trinity. Now we’re prepared to say that God is absolute relatedness. I would name salvation as simply the readiness, the capacity, and the willingness to stay in relationship. As long as you show up, the Spirit will keep working. That’s why Jesus shows up in this world as a naked, vulnerable one—a defenseless baby. Talk about utter relationship! Naked vulnerability means I’m going to let you influence me; I’m going to allow you to change me. What’s the alternative? “You can’t change me.” “You can’t teach me anything.” “I know already.” “I have all the answers.” When you don’t give other people any power in your life, when you block them, I think you’re spiritually dead. And not far from evil. It won’t be long before you start doing evil things. Oh sure, you won’t call them evil—you will not even recognize them as evil on the surface of your awareness. Atomized, sequestered consciousness is the seed of unrelated Aristotelian independence bearing its full fruit in Western isolation; we become unquestioned masters of our own shrinking kingdoms. Empathy starves in those hermetically sealed containers of self; goodness goes there to die. What a contrast to the Way of Jesus, which is an invitation to a Trinitarian way of living, loving, and relating—on earth as it is in Godhead. We—not you, but we—are intrinsically like the Trinity, living in an absolute relatedness. We call this love. We really were made for love, and outside of it we die very quickly. And our spiritual lineage tells us that Love is personal—“God is love.”33711
we have Jesus addressing his God—who is apparently other than himself—and we have Jesus offering to share a part of himself, also the Father’s self, which he calls Spirit. Father, Son, Spirit: Which is which? our ancestors surely wondered. Jesus describes this full flow in and out as breathing,36 which is yet another good metaphor, breath and Spirit being linguistically inseparable in Hebrew. Thus, the holy breath emanates from God and is named as God.774
all authentic knowledge of God is participatory knowledge.790
Neither of these know how to know! We have sacrificed our unique telescope for a very inadequate microscope. Divine knowing—some would call it spiritual intuition—is actually an allowing of someone else to know in us, through us, for us, and even as us. It794
In other words, God (and uniquely the Trinity) cannot be known as we know any other object—such as a machine, an objective idea, or a tree—which we are able to “objectify.” We look at objects, and we judge them from a distance through our normal intelligence, parsing out their varying parts, separating this from that, presuming that to understand the parts is always to be able to understand the whole. But divine things can never be objectified in this way; they can only be “subjectified” by becoming one with them! When neither yourself nor the other is treated as a mere object, but both rest in an I-Thou of mutual admiration, you have spiritual knowing.39 Some of us call this contemplative knowing. Such knowing intuits things in their wholeness, with all levels of connection and meaning, and perhaps how they fit in the full scheme of things. Thus, the contemplative response to the moment is always appreciation and inherent re-spect (“to look at a second time”) because I am now a part of what I am trying to see. Our first practical and partial observation of most things lacks this respect. It is not yet contemplative knowing.810
the originating mystery of Trinity both names and begins the mirroring process, allowing us to know all that we need to know by the same endless process of mirroring and reflecting.40 We know things in their depth and beauty only by this second gaze of love. Hold on to this central metaphor of mirroring as we move forward: a true mirror first receives an image and then reflects it back truthfully—but now so that I can see myself, too. The all-important thing is that you find the right mirror that mirrors you honestly and at depth. All personhood is created in this process, and our job is always to stay inside this mirroring.822
our task is to trustfully receive and then reflect back the inner image transmitted to us until, as the apostle Paul expressed, “we are gradually turned into the image that we reflect.”42829
This is the whole spiritual journey in one sentence! All love, goodness, and holiness is a reflected gift. You take all things into yourself by gazing at them with reverence, and this completes the circuit of love—because this is how creation is looking out at you. The inner life of the Trinity has become the outer life of all creation. This is good! This is all about expanding our recognition and reverence for the universal mystery of Incarnation (the enfleshment of the Divine) until, in the end, as Augustine shockingly puts it, “there shall be one Christ, loving Himself.”43 And of course, he is only building on Paul: “There is only Christ: he is everything and he is in everything.”44 The Christ is the universalization of what many of us first fell in love with in Jesus.831
The divine mirroring will never stop; mirroring is how the whole transformation process is personally initiated and finally achieved. But we have to be taught how to “gaze steadily into this law of perfect freedom, and make this our habit,” as James so brilliantly intuits it.46839
no objectification of God is ever possible. We can only be mirrored, and we can only know and see ourselves fully both in a mirror and through a mirror. It is thus crucial and central to have a well-polished mirror that can see and reflect God in you. Yes, good theology and God-image are important! And dare we believe that God sees a bit of Godself mirrored in new form as God gazes at us? This is a very fair conclusion. Mirrored knowledge is not “logical” knowledge—it’s reflected and received knowledge.844
All people need to be seen for themselves and as themselves, and receive the divine gaze intimately—and not just rely on someone else’s seeing.852
People prefer laws and reassuring repetitive rituals to intimate mirroring. True mirroring only needs to be received and recognized once—and once is enough to change you forever. But it deepens if we “gaze steadily and make it a habit,” as James says. This is the heart of all prayer.857
Humans get excited about something only if it includes them in some way. God surely knew this about us, and so God included us inside of God’s own knowing—by planting the Holy Spirit within us as the Inner Knower and Reminder of “all things.”51 This is indeed a re-minding, a very different kind of mind that is given to us! But it gets even better: we know and accept ourselves in the very same movement in which we’re knowing and accepting God; in surrendering to God, we simultaneously accept our best and fullest self. What a payoff! What a truly holy exchange! And it’s all accomplished in the process of mirroring. On the psychological level, this is Heinz Kohut’s “recovery of the self.”52 The doctrine of Trinity says that it’s finally participatory knowledge that matters, not rational calculating, which is but one limited form of knowing. God—and the human person by an irreducibly important extension—must never be objectified. In fact, God refuses to be an object of our thinking. As John of the Cross so frequently insisted, God refuses to be known but can only be loved.53870
we’d have every right to expect a family resemblance between ourselves and everything else. Trinity allows our scientific and spiritual cosmologies to finally operate as one,889
Robert Lanza’s work on biocentrism so brilliantly demonstrates: “the universe is created by life and not the other way around.”55 Life-flow is the ground of everything, absolutely everything. There is a similarity between the perceived two ends of the universe, the Divine and the human, just as we should have expected: “Let us create in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves” is how Genesis first described the Creator speaking.56 And the Hebrew even uses the plural pronouns for some wonderful reason.895
We have a lot of catching up to do. The energy in the universe is not in the planets, or in the protons or neutrons, but in the relationship between them. Not in the particles but in the space between them. Not in the cells of organisms but in the way the cells feed and give feedback to one another. Not in any precise definition of the three persons of the Trinity as much as in the relationship between the Three! This is where all the power for infinite renewal is at work: The loving relationship between them. The infinite love between them. The dance itself. In other words, it is an entirely relational universe. If, at any time, we try to stop this flow moving through us, with us, and in us,57 we fall into the true state of sin—and it is truly a state more than a momentary behavior. Sin is the state of being closed down, shut off, blocked, and thus resisting the eternal flow that we’re meant to be. By a hardened heart or a cold spirit, by holding another person apart in hatred, you’ve thus cut yourself off from the flow. Jesus therefore criticizes the religious leaders who want to condemn the woman caught in adultery much more than the woman herself. Jesus’ words to the murderous, religious bean counters in John 8 forever stand as a rather wholesale critique of all stone-throwing, and they locate sin where we would rather not see it. The divine flow either flows both in and out, or it is not flowing at all. The Law of Flow is simple, and Jesus states it in many formulations, such as “Happy are the merciful; they shall have mercy shown to them.”58 Sin is always a refusal of mutuality and a closing down into separateness.908
Vulnerability Did you ever imagine that what we call “vulnerability” might just be the key to ongoing growth? In my experience, healthily vulnerable people use every occasion to expand, change, and grow. Yet it is a risky position to live undefended, in a kind of constant openness to the other—because it would mean others could sometimes actually wound you (from vulnus, “wound”). But only if we choose to take this risk do we also allow the exact opposite possibility: the other might also gift you, free you, and even love you.966
This, then, seems to be the work of the Spirit: to keep you growing is to keep you vulnerable to life and love itself. Notice that the major metaphors for the Spirit are always dynamic, energetic, and moving: elusive wind, descending dove, falling fire, and flowing water. Spirit-led people never stop growing and changing and recognizing the new moment of opportunity. How strange to think that so much of religion became a worship of the status quo, until you remember that the one thing the ego hates and fears more than anything else is change. What, then, is the path to holiness? It’s the same as the path to wholeness. And we are never “there” yet. We are always just in the river. Don’t try to push the river or make the river happen; it is already happening, and you cannot stop it. All you can do is recognize it, enjoy it, and ever more fully allow it to carry you.977
This is the great surprise, and for some a disappointment: this divine flow has very little to do with you.984
The touchable ones are the healed ones; it’s pretty much that simple.992
Do you want to be healed? If the answer is a vulnerable, trusting, or confident one, the flow always happens, and the person is healed. Try to disprove me on that! And believe it or not, it’s much harder to allow this touch and to surrender to this flow than it is to have a strong moral stance on this or that, or to believe doctrines about this, that, or the other, which is surely why the unconverted person falls to these lower levels instead of just staying trustfully in the always-vulnerable river of life.994
Weak Wisdom Let’s stay with this matter of vulnerability for a moment, and even its less-flattering synonym: weakness. “Weak” isn’t a trait any of us wish to be associated with, and yet the apostle Paul describes no less than God having weakness! Paul says that “God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.”63 How could God be weak? We are in a new ballpark here. Let’s admit that we admire strength and importance. We admire self-sufficiency, autonomy, the self-made person. This is surely the American way. This weakness of God, as Paul calls it, is not something we admire or want to imitate. Maybe this has been part of our resistance to this mystery of Trinity. Human strength I would describe as self-sufficiency. God’s weakness I would describe as inter-being. Inter-being is a different way of standing in the world than the self-made person stands. Human strength admires holding on. There is something positive about this; it’s not all wrong. But the irony is, this mystery is much more about letting go, which looks—let’s admit it—first of all like weakness to us, not like strength. We’re almost embarrassed by this mystery of Trinity; maybe that’s why we haven’t unpackaged it. Human strength admires autonomy; God’s mystery rests in mutuality. We like control; God, it seems, loves vulnerability. In fact, if Jesus is the image of God, then God is much better described as “Absolute Vulnerability Between Three” than “All-mighty One.” Yet how many Christian prayers begin with some form of “Almighty God”? If you’re immersed in the Trinitarian mystery, you must equally say “All-Vulnerable God,” too! But Brené Brown’s popularity notwithstanding,64 vulnerability isn’t admired in our culture, is it? Could a truly vulnerable candidate easily be elected president of the United States? I doubt it. It seems like a prerequisite to appear like you know more than you really do; this impresses us for some reason. If we haven’t touched and united with the vulnerable place within us, we’re normally projecting seeming invulnerability outside. This seems to be particularly true of men, as many years of giving male initiation rites taught me.65 Human strength wants to promote, project, and protect a clear sense of self-identity and autonomy and not inter-being or interface. “I know who I am,” we love to say. And yet we have this Father, Son, and Holy Spirit operating out of a received identity given by another. “I am Son only in relationship to Father, and he gives me my who-ness, my being.” We admire needing no one; apparently, the Trinity admires needing. Needing everything—total communion with all things and all being (although needing may be in a metaphorical sense). We’re practiced at hiding and self-protecting, not at showing all our cards. God seems to be into total disclosure. Human strength is defined in asserting boundaries. God, it seems, is in the business of dissolving boundaries. So we enter into paradox—what’s Three is one and what’s One is three. We just can’t resolve that, and so we confuse unity with uniformity. God endlessly creates and allows diversity. All you need to do is look at the animal world, the world under the sea, hidden little insects, or all the human beings in a grocery store—who of you looks alike? God clearly loves diversity. In all creation, is there any evidence to show that God is into uniformity? We like it because it gives the ego a sense of control—a false one. And so we constantly substitute uniformity for unity, obedience for love, and conformity for true loyalty to our deepest identity—which takes much more confidence and courage. The mystery that we’re talking about here is clearly diversity on display! The Three are diverse, different, and distinct—and yet they are one.1003
Brené Brown’s wonderful research and teaching about vulnerability? Find your way to brenebrown.com immediately! 65. The initiation of young males, usually between the ages of 13–17, was the absolute norm in almost all indigenous cultures on all continents until this began to fall apart in the last couple of centuries. Here was the universal assumption: If the male is not made to walk journeys of powerlessness, you can assume he will almost always abuse any power that he attains. Such individualism and power-seeking was toxic for the survival of any tribe or community. Thus, “rites of passage” assured at least some degree of humility, vulnerability, interiority, and spirituality in the male, who usually avoids all of these if he possibly can. Today, the male initiation community I cofounded continues to flourish as Illuman (Illuman.org). See also the worldwide ManKind Project (ManKindProject.org) and its women’s corollary, Woman Within (WomanWithin.org).1044
God’s goal, it seems to me, is the same in creation. It is the making of persons, not the making of a uniform mob, which means there is clear diversity and a kind of what I’m going to call open-endedness in all of nature, and to the very nature of this creation. In other words, heaven is precisely not uniformity. Because we did not honor Trinity, many Christians were totally unprepared for any notion of evolution—again forcing many would-be believers into quite sincere atheism. The diversity of heaven was never something I considered in my earlier years. I thought we were all handed the same white robe and standard-issue harp, assigned to an identical cloud for all eternity. But how does Jesus deconstruct this big-box, strip-mall, McHeaven franchise? He tells us: “In my Father’s house are many mansions.”66 What a contrast! Even in the eternal nature of things, you’re somehow you in your you-ness, on the path that God is leading you on, the journey you are going through, the burdens that you are bearing. All of these are combining to create the precise alchemy of your soul, your holiness, and your response. In the eternal scheme of things, we discover that all God wants from you is you. It’s just so humbling, because it always feels like not enough, doesn’t it? “All I want to do is be like Saint Francis,” I said to my spiritual director, over and over, for my first decade as a Franciscan. Finally, one day, he said, “Hey Richard, you’re not, and you’re never going to be, Francis of Assisi. You’re not even close, all right? You’re ‘unfortunately’ Richard Rohr from Kansas.” I said to myself, This doesn’t sound nearly as dramatic or exciting. Except when I realized: all God wants is Richard from Kansas. But that’s what I don’t know how to give you, God! It feels so insignificant, and yet this is the liberating secret: I am precisely the gift God wants—in full and humble surrender. There is unity between the path taken and the destination where we finally arrive. Saints are not uniform but are each unique creations of grace according to the journey God has led them through. This is God’s great risk of freedom: allowing us the freedom to do our own thing. The scandal of grace is that God will even defer—talk about self-emptying!—to using these mistaken dead ends in our favor. This is the ultimate turnaround of love: each of us is our own beauty, a freely-created, grace-sculpted beauty—what1058
That we’ve come to God through tragedy, not by doing things right but invariably by doing things wrong, is a gift. We’ve learned so much more by our mistakes than we ever have by our successes. In the men’s rite of passage work that I’ve done, I tell the men on the last night before initiation that success has nothing—absolutely nothing—to teach you spiritually after age thirty. It just feels good. That’s all. Everything you learn at my age—in my seventies now—is by failure, humiliation, and suffering; things falling apart. Dissolution is the only thing that allows the soul to go to a deeper place. So why do I dare say this is true and not fear that you’re going to call me some cheap secular humanist? How do I know that this quixotic, winding-road character of holiness is not just my wishful thinking? Precisely because of this Trinity code. It reveals a pattern of perfect freedom in relationship whereby each person allows the other to be themselves, and yet remains in perfect given-ness toward the other, not withholding from other-ness. Contemporary Franciscan, scholar, and teacher Ilia Delio asks if we can reframe our entire understanding of God, freedom, and relationship along evolutionary, Trinitarian lines: Can we understand the Trinity as an infinite emergent process? In this respect, change is not contrary to God; rather, change is integral to God because God is love and love is constantly transcending itself toward greater union.… The dynamic life of the Trinity as ever newness in love means that every divine relationship is a new beginning because every divine person is a transcendent horizon of love. Being is transcendence in love, and God’s Being in love is eternally free.67 Here we find the pattern that allows us to create authentic community and authentic unity, celebrating authentic freedom. I know those of us who are Americans love this word freedom, but I don’t think we understand it in its full-blown spiritual sense, which asks much more of us than, for example, protecting boundaries from terrorists. True spiritual freedom is only attained, as far as I can see, by one who sleeps and rests inside God’s perfect freedom. Diversity is created and maintained in Trinitarian love. Freedom is created and maintained in Trinitarian love. Union is not destroyed by diversity or by freedom.1085
Ilia Delio, The Emergent Christ (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011), 4–5.1107
The World in a Word A Trinitarian person who is in formation is someone being freed of narcissism’s chains. A partner in the divine dance is someone who agrees to stand in the mutual relationship that God is—the relationship that God has already drawn us into gratuitously. As Lay Cistercian and teacher Carl McColman puts it: God is in us, because we are in Christ. As members of the mystical body, Christians actually partake in the divine nature of the Trinity. We do not merely watch the dance, we dance the dance. We join hands with Christ and the Spirit flows through us and between us and our feet move always in the loving embrace of the Father. In that we are members of the mystical body of Christ, we see the joyful love of the Father through the eyes of the Son. And with every breath, we breathe the Holy Spirit.68 But hand-taking, embracing, and breathing-with aren’t often immediately attractive to us! Vulnerability, letting go, total disclosure, surrender—these don’t come easily in the cultural waters we’re swimming in. Culture is built on a movement toward empire, toward aggrandizement of the group, toward making itself number one—this creates the interior conflict that Scripture already describes as the conflict between the world and the Spirit. And please understand that in the New Testament, the oft-used word world doesn’t refer to creation. The best interpretation would be the “system.” This system is the way we structure reality, and it’s almost always going to be diametrically opposed to the mystery of the Trinity. You can see why the most Jesus hoped for—and why we say you can’t understand Jesus without the Trinity—is that his group become a “little flock.”69 Today, we call it “critical mass.” The Gospels call it “the Twelve.”70 Jesus calls it “leaven,”71 or “yeast.”72 He seems to have the patience and humility to trust a slow, leavening process. This is quite different from any notion of empire or “Christendom,” which always relies upon the use of power. There’s no evidence Jesus ever expected his little movement to take over the world—that is, the “system”—but instead that there’d be just enough people living into this kind of mutuality to be the leaven in the dough keeping this entire creation from total delusion and self-destruction.1108
see that luminous presence everywhere else. If you can’t see that, you’re not very saved, in my opinion. Your seeing and allowing does not match God’s.1135
there’s good news: you can give up all condemnation for Lent and leave your antagonisms in the empty tomb! The more light and goodness you can see, the more Trinitarian you are. When you can see as Jesus and my father St. Francis see, you see divine light in everyone, especially in those who are different, who are “other,” who are sinners, wounded, lepers, and lame—in those, as Scripture seems to indicate, where God shows up the best. Mother Teresa summed this up beautifully, in ways Eucharistic and kenotic: We [the Missionaries of Charity] are called to be contemplatives in the heart of the world by: Seeking the face of God in everything, everyone, everywhere, all the time, and seeing His hand in every happening. Seeing and adoring the presence of Jesus, especially in the lowly appearance of bread, and in the distressing disguise of the poor.73 The degree to which you can see the divine image where you’d rather not tells me how fully the divine image is now operative within you. Your life is no longer your own. You are instead a two-way reflecting mirror.1138
Trinitarian revelation says start with the loving—and this is the new definition of being! There is now a hidden faithfulness at the heart of the universe. Everything is now positioned to transform all of our lead into gold;1160
We certainly want to preserve a sense of transcendent greatness in God. I know that God is well beyond me, or God would not be any kind of God I could respect. But if this idea of Trinity is the shape of God, and Incarnation is true, then a more honest and truly helpful geometrical figure would be (as we have seen) a circle or even a spiral, and not a pyramid. Let the circle dance rearrange your Christian imagination. No more “old man with a white beard on a throne,” please! This Trinitarian flow is like the rise and fall of tides on a shore. All reality can now be pictured as an Infinite Outflowing that empowers and generates an Eternal Infolding. This eternal flow is echoed in history by the Incarnate Christ and the Indwelling Spirit. And as Meister Eckhart and other mystics say in other ways, the infolding always corresponds to the outflowing. (I love the German word for Trinity, Dreifaltigheit, which literally means “the three infoldings.”) The foundational good news is that creation and humanity have been drawn into this flow! We are not outsiders or spectators76 but inherently part of the divine dance. Some mystics who were on real journeys of prayer took this message to its consistent conclusion: creation is thus “the fourth person of the Blessed Trinity”! Once more, the divine dance isn’t a closed circle—we’re all invited! As the independent scholar, teacher, and fishing-lure designer C. Baxter Kruger puts it: The stunning truth is that this triune God, in amazing and lavish love, determined to open the circle and share the Trinitarian life with others. This is the one, eternal and abiding reason for the creation of the world and of human life. There is no other God, no other will of God, no second plan, no hidden agenda for human beings. Before the creation of the world, the Father, Son and Spirit set their love upon us and planned to bring us to share and know and experience the Trinitarian life itself. Unto this end the cosmos was called into being, and the human race was fashioned, and Adam and Eve were given a place in the coming of Jesus Christ, the Father’s Son himself, in and through whom the dream of our adoption would be accomplished.771169
This even fits the “dynamic” metaphysical principle that “the interweaving of the three [always] produces a fourth” on another level.781189
this is the fourth place pictured and reserved as a mirror in Andrei Rublev’s fifteenth-century icon of the Trinity. For those in on this open secret, their human nature has a definitive direction and dignity…a Source and a self-confidence that you just can’t get in any other way. You know that your worth is not about you personally or individually doing it right on your own; instead, your humanity is just a matter of allowing and loving the divine flow, which Christians usually call the Holy Spirit. Life becomes a matter of showing up and saying yes. Frankly, a Trinitarian spirituality is much more of a corporate, historical, and social notion of salvation, which was always much more appreciated in the Eastern church than in the West. We will talk more about the “heresy” of Western individualism later. Once God included us in the divine flow—both outward and inward—all we can really do is opt out, refusing to participate.79 And sadly, that possibility must logically be preserved, or free will means nothing. And love can only thrive and expand inside of perfect freedom.801192
Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Dare We Hope “That All Men Be Saved”? (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988) and David Burnfield, Patristic Universalism, 2nd ed. (privately published; printed by CreateSpace, Charleston, SC, 2016). These are only two of the many books that are demonstrating that the supposed heresy disparagingly called “universalism” by many Christians was a rather common belief in the early Eastern church and even the Scriptures.1210
As I have expressed, this divine dance takes on a centripetal force, pulling the energy in, but then it becomes this centrifugal force, moving the energy out—and that is our universe: everything; no exceptions. Everything came forth from this divine dance, and our new appreciation of Trinity is giving us a new grounding for interfaith understanding. It’s giving us a marvelous new basis for appreciating how this mystery is embedded as the code: not just in our religious constructs, but in everything that exists. If there is only one God, and if there is one pattern to this God, then the wonderful thing is that we can expect to find that pattern everywhere. I believe one reason so many theologians are interested in Trinity right now is that we’re finding quantum physics, biology, and cosmology are finally at a level of development that our understanding of everything from atoms to galaxies to organisms is affirming, confirming, and allowing us to use the old Trinitarian language, and now with a whole new level of appreciation. A whole new level of, “My God! It just might be true!” Imagine this: the deepest intuitions of our poets and mystics and Holy Writ are aligning with findings on the leading edges of science and empirical discovery. When inner and outer worlds converge like this, something beautiful is afoot—the reversal of a centuries-long lovers’ quarrel between science and spirituality, mind and heart. What physicists and contemplatives alike are confirming is that the foundational nature of reality is relational; everything is in relationship with everything else. As a central Christian mystery, we’ve been saying this from the very beginning while still utterly failing to grasp its meaning.1215
Start with the mystery of relationship and relatedness; this is where the power is! It’s exactly what the atomic scientists and astrophysicists are telling us today.1238
Perhaps the most audacious contradiction of all is Oppenheimer’s embrace of a kind of shadow trinity as the very name of his test site. I cannot help but recall the dark places where Christianity, under the influence of empire, has lost its way. When not ignoring Trinity altogether, we’ve instead debased our telling of this Three-in-One as a command-and-control caricature: distinct from the biblical Trinity or mystical Trinity, this is a hierarchical delegation where a single-minded father-ruler demands that an expediently-dispatched son use immense power (or force) to batter and break humanity. Tragically, this is the vision of God that wins out all too often. And—from abusive relationships to the creation of astonishing weapons of mass destruction—this vision has consequences. Oppenheimer wasn’t blind to these consequences. It seems he feared that in breaking open the atom, they enacted an undoing or reversal of trinity, destabilizing the tripartite atom and disrupting the source code of reality. It’s no wonder that, upon witnessing its awful first blast, he immediately invoked the Hindu deity Vishnu, quoting from the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”84 Our imaginations, applied to worlds “above” and “below,” can be used for such potent life and death.85 This is part of the mystery of freedom that God grants us. This particular mystery of exploding power, as atomic scientists have told me, is not found in the protons. It’s not found in the electrons, or neutrons either. Believe it or not, the explosive power is found in the interaction between them. It’s called nuclear power, and it can change everything.1267
from the “Great Chain of Being” to the “Nested Holarchy of Being,” as the philosopher Ken Wilber puts it,88 we can rightly speak of As within, so without. If all reality is a holon and has a fractal character, as physicists are also telling us, then each part contains and mirrors the whole. If the cosmos as we know it originates from a “big bang”—from a “Let there be”—that means that one point just explodes with life and gives birth to the many lives. When does this many cease to be one? When did this one ever not contain the many? Never! This is what the relational pattern of the universe is teaching us, from Godhead to geochemistry and everything in between.1291
How do we practice this presence—of reality? Scientists and mystics alike will tell us: Be present! Experiment! Stay curious. This is Contemplation 101. Let go of what you “think” is your intelligence center—because what you think is your intelligence cannot understand the atom, cannot understand the galaxies, and cannot understand what is birthing and animating all existence. This momentous truth can occasionally be caught but not easily taught. We’re standing in the middle of an awesome mystery—life itself!—and the only appropriate response before this mystery is humility. If we’re resolved that this is where we want to go—into the mystery, not to hold God and reality but to let God and reality hold us—then I think religion is finally in its proper and appropriate place.1301
See Ken Wilber, “From the Great Chain of Being to Postmodernism in Three Easy Steps” (2006), 2, 4, www.kenwilber.com/Writings/PDF/FromGC2PM_GENERAL_2005_NN.pdf.1321
When we built on Aristotle’s belief that substance is a higher and preferred category than relationship (to put it another way, that nouns are better than verbs), we inherited an absolutely non-Trinitarian notion of the human person that was autonomous, static, and without a metaphysical capacity for union with our own beings, much less the divine nature of God.89 In this metaphysically hamstrung version of reality, we were not created in “the image and likeness of God,” after all!1324
Boethius (480–524), whose Consolations of Philosophy had great influence throughout the entire medieval period, acted as a sort of bridge between classical Western culture and Christianity. He defined the human being as “an individual substance of a rational nature,” and in some ways this definition has persisted to this day. There is no evidence Boethius was influenced by the doctrine of the Trinity, and it shows. What thus won out in our entire Western anthropology was human individuality and human rationality, instead of foundational relationality and an honoring of the intuitive nature of the human person, which is healthy religion’s natural habitat. A Trinitarian theology would have told us that human personhood is a subsistent relation at its core, generating, in fact, relationships of unconditional love with the same standing as the persons of the Trinity. This is precisely the best description of what we mean when we quote Genesis to say that we are created “in the image and likeness of God.” But we did not build on this Trinitarian grounding. The fallout of privileging “substance” over relationship is difficult to overestimate. The entire subsequent tradition had a very hard time giving any solid, inherent foundation to the meaning of divine union, holiness, salvation, or even incarnation. This is a huge price to pay; the consequence is an eviscerated Christian theology, a hollowed-out shell known for little else than a soft and sentiment-laden worldview.1334
Scotus and Merton: Time to Re-verb In order to be vital, we must be able to demonstrate a metaphysical core for Christian spirituality and holiness—not merely a behavioral, psychological, or moral one. A Trinitarian metaphysic provides just such a vibrant and inherent core. Trinity is and must be our stable, rooted identity that does not come and go, rise and fall. This is the rock of salvation. And of course, it’s so interesting that this stable root is rather perfectly mirrored in the three particles of every atom orbiting and cycling around one another—the basic physical building block of the universe. What happens if these atoms are intentionally destabilized? Precisely a bomb of death and destruction. In many permutations that have led us to modern individualism, most Christians still have retained a more “pagan” understanding of the human person, almost totally reversing the original Trinitarian use of the word person—as one who is a dynamic sounding-through—to an autonomous self that, at the end of the day, is kin to nothing. What would it look like to rebuild on a Trinitarian metaphysic and recreate a truly human full personhood? It would start by recognizing that each person is created by God as unique and irreplaceable—one to whom God has transferred and communicated God’s divine image in relationship, and who can, in turn, communicate and reflect that image to other created beings. Each and every one of us. Merton discovered this solid grounding in a Trinitarian and “personalist” philosophy and theology in the work of a thirteenth-century Franciscan philosopher-theologian, John Duns Scotus. A deep-dive into Scotus allowed Merton to move to the heights of contemplative awareness. Most do not get to enjoy this core; salvation and holiness become just a wish, a hope, at best a verbal affirmation that “I and the Father are one.” But all too often—in contemporary religion and spirituality alike—we have no basis in consistent, fleshed-out thinking to really believe this. Thus the vast majority of Christians have not been able to overcome the gap between divine personhood and human personhood. It largely became a matter of trying to overcome it by a magical notion of sacraments if you were Catholic or Orthodox, or a transactional notion of “strong belief” or moral behavior if you were Protestant. But in either case, there was no inherent capacity for divine union that could be evoked and built upon in our very soul. Thus, it was consistently a very unstable core for most Christians, often degenerated into a kind of make-believe, if we’re honest. The Perfect Freedom of God This solid core of a soul, entirely relationally created, is fully known and fully loved only in God—and even as God, as daring as this sounds.1350
All human personhood implies a process of coming to be in love! Sin is every refusal to move in the direction of our deepest identity as love. Any definition of the person as a substance instead of a relationship tends to leave out the movement, growth, and mutual mirroring that moves us forth in existence.1394
just like the Trinity, we are not a substance, but a relationship. Always in the process of being loved and passing along love.1405
Creative Continuation Daniel Walsh, who was Merton’s primary philosophy teacher, says he’s not sure if the human person can even legitimately be called a creation, because we are a continuance, an emanation from, a subsistent relation with that we call Trinity.91 We are in continuity with God somehow, and not a separate creation. We are “chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world,” as Ephesians puts it.92 Mature Christianity is thus an invitation to share in the personal life of God, a dynamic of generated love forever continued in space and time through God’s creatures. Thus, God’s self-knowledge includes knowledge of us, and God’s self-love includes love of us. They are the same knowing, the same loving, and the same freedom. Yes, in some sense we become an “other” that can be seen as a separate object from God, but from God’s side we are always known and loved subject to subject, just as the persons of the Trinity know and love one another. God and the human person must know (and can know) one another center to center, subject to subject—and never subject to object. This is the perhaps the clearest way to describe God’s unconditional acceptance of us, forgiveness of our mistakes, and mercy toward us in all circumstances: We are never an object to God. God cannot but love God’s image in us. So a fully Christian theology and philosophy of the human person must say that human personhood originates in the divine Logos, the eternal Christ, as imitations and reflections of God’s relationship to Godself. We are constituted by the same relationship that exists between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit! “The end for which the human person is created is to manifest the Truth of Christ in the love God has for himself in his Divine Trinity,” Daniel Walsh says in his lectures to the monks. This is the theology of personhood upon which Thomas Merton builds his monumental worldview, and which we can, too. Divine Personhood and human personhood are reciprocal, mutually-mirroring concepts. God’s nature as relationship creates ours, and ours is constituted by this same bond, which is infinite openness and capacity to love. We must know that we are in fact objectively loveable to really be able to love ourselves. That is what Divine Personhood assures and guarantees. Your false self is not ready for unconditional love. Love and respect, yes. But not unconditional love—only conditional love. This becomes Merton’s foundation for what he calls the True Self, which is always, objectively, and forever completely loveable—all ephemera notwithstanding. I believe this was supposed to be the foundational good news of the gospel, the rock of salvation—a basis for human personhood that does not vacillate and cannot fail. Jesus is announcing with his words and exemplifying with his Table and teaching alike that human persons are created inside of the substantial and infinite love of the Trinity. You cannot “get” to such a place; you can only rest and rejoice in such a place. 91. Daniel Walsh, unpublished notes from his teaching at the Gethsemani monastery. Walsh taught regularly at the monastery from the late 1950s to the early 1960s. 92. See Ephesians 1:4.1412
The doctrine of the Trinity was largely shelved as an embarrassing abstraction—even by most preachers, teachers, and theologians. God was diminished, and we all lost out. Jesus alone was forced to carry the entire drama of liberation, which he could do, it seems; but there was always a much bigger foundation, frame, dynamic, and energy missing from the salvation equation. Here’s how Julian of Norwich experienced this reality, all the way back in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England: The Trinity suddenly filled my heart with the greatest joy. And I understood that in heaven it will be like that for ever for those who come there. For the Trinity is God, God is the Trinity; the Trinity is our maker and protector, the Trinity is our dear friend for ever, our everlasting joy and bliss, through our Lord Jesus Christ. And this was shown in the first revelation, and in all of them; for it seems to me that where Jesus is spoken of, the Holy Trinity is to be understood.93 We cannot separate Jesus from the Trinity. Yet the average person in the pews never had a chance to enjoy the much bigger economy of grace. We swam around in a small pool called scarcity, which is now evident in most of our stingy, hoarding politics and economics. Even our old catechisms said that the “theological virtues” of faith, hope, and love, which were said to be the nature of Divine Being, were offered to us as “a sharing in the very life of God.” These, it was argued in the medieval church, were not first of all gifts to individuals but gifts to society, history, and humanity as a whole.94 This is prefigured in two great thinkers in the Church, Augustine and Aquinas, who argued that the virtue of hope applies first of all to the collective before the individual. Yet we tried to generate hope in the isolated individual, while leaving him and her adrift in a cosmos, society, and humanity that was heading toward hopelessness and punishment. It is very hard for individuals to enjoy faith, hope, and love, or even to preach faith, hope, and love—which alone last95—unless society itself first enjoys faith, hope, and love in some collective way. This is much of our problem today; we have not given the world any message of cosmic hope, but only threatening messages of Apocalypse and Armageddon. God as Trinity gives hope to society as a whole, because it is based on the very nature of existence itself and not on the up-and-down behaviors of individuals, which are always unstable.1449
Marketing experts say children (and dogs) are even more effective than sex in advertising. Why? Because children and dogs are still filled with a natural hope and expectation that their smile will be returned. They tend to make direct eye contact, looking right into you, just grinning away (unless, of course, they have been abused). This is pure being. This is uninhibited flow. Surely, this is why Jesus told us to be like children. There is nothing stopping the pure flow in a child or a dog, and that’s why any of us who have an ounce of eros, humanity, or love in us are defenseless against such unguarded presence. You can only with great effort resist kissing a wide-eyed baby or petting an earnest dog. You want to pull them to yourself with love because they are, for a moment—forgive me—“God”! Or is it the other way around? Is it you who have become “God” by standing in such an unresisted flow? Both are true, of course. We see this flow in the attraction of all beauty, in all admiring, in all ecstasy, in all solidarity with any suffering. Anyone who fully allows the flow will see the divine image even in p