by Richard Rohr
Scripture quotations marked (esv) are taken from the esv® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®) copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotation marked (isv) is taken from the Holy Bible: International Standard Version®. Copyright © 1995–2014 by The ISV Foundation of Fullerton, California, USA. Used by permission of Davidson Press, LLC. All rights reserved internationally.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978–0–281–07815–8
eBook ISBN 978–0–281–07816–5
eBook by Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong
Contents
Foreword by William Paul Young
Introduction: “Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast”
Trinity: MIA
A Space at God’s Table
A (W)hole in God
Part I
Wanted: A Trinitarian Revolution
Spiritual Paradigm Shift
Dusting Off a Daring Doctrine
Math Problems
The Relationship Is the Vehicle
Metaphors Be with You!
A Mirrored Universe
Vulnerability
Weak Wisdom
The Delight of Diversity
The World in a Word
Reshaping Our Image
Atomic Bonds
Creator and Destroyer of Worlds
Aristotle and Boethius: The Price of an Invading Noun
Scotus and Merton: Time to Re-verb
The Perfect Freedom of God
Creative Continuation
Paradigms Lost
Distinct Union
Tide Boxes at Kmart
Loving All the Wrong People
Emptiness Alone Is Prepared for Fullness
The Space Between
How the Law of Three Changes Everything
Is the Trinity a Boy or a Girl?
The Power of Concentric Circles
Richard of St. Victor and the Joy Supreme
The Paradox of Restlessness and Contentment
Body-Based Knowing
The Many Belong in the One
Accessing the Divine Force Field
Always Creating Otherness
Next
Part II
Why the Trinity? Why Now?
Three Reasons for Recovery
What Holds Us Back from Genuine Spiritual Experience?
Two Ways to Break Through
Suffering’s Surprising Sustenance
At-One-Ment
What About the Wrath of God?
Expanding Our Horizons
Silence: Father
The Living Manifestation: The Christ
The Dynamism Within and Between: Holy Spirit
TDD—Trinity Deficit Disorder
Absentee Father
Son: Have You Seen Me?
The Relentless Drive of the Spirit
Inside-Out Prayer
Primal Prayer
Transcendence Deficit Disorder
Interfaith Friendship
Do We Have to Talk About Sin?
Entering By Another Door
Being There
An Amazing Chain of Being
Trinity in Eternity Past
The Wildest Wave Alive
Real Presence
Being and Becoming
Essential Ecstasy
Too Good to Be True?
The Incarnation Is the Gospel
Bleeding and Forbearing
The Great Attractor
Part III
The Holy Spirit
Wholly Reconciling
The Divine Energy
Everything Is Holy Now
Acknowledgments
Appendix: Experiencing the Trinity: Seven Practices
About the Authors
Dedication
From Richard Rohr
To all the unsuspecting folks who do not know they are already within the Divine Flow.
From Mike Morrell
To my daughters, Jubilee Grace and Nova Rain. You embody Spirit’s unexpected movements in my life!
Foreword
ONE alone
is not by nature Love,
or Laugh,
or Sing
ONE alone
may be Prime Mover,
Unknowable
Indivisible
All
and if Everything is All and All is One
One is Alone
Self-Centered
Not Love
Not Laugh
Not Sing
TWO
Ying/Yang
Dark/Light
Male/Female
contending Dualism
Affirming Evil/Good
And striving toward Balance
At best Face-to-Face
but Never Community
THREE
Face-to-Face-to-Face
Community
Ambiguity
Mystery
Love for the Other
And for the Other’s Love
Within
Other-Centered
Self-Giving
Loving
Singing
Laughter
A fourth is created
Ever-loved and loving.
Relationship has always been the wild card, the court jester who appears in the midst of our human agenda and our hallucinations of independent self-sufficiency, revealing by any means that the emperor is naked. When you even skim the edges of relationship, you submit to mystery and lose control. Marriage would be so much easier if there wasn’t another person involved, but then it would be meaningless, too. Relationships are entwined, entrenched, elusive, messy, enabling, enrapturing, maddening, exhilarating, frustrating, exposing, and too beautiful for words. There are moments when we think we might finally have a whisper of control over our world, and then—whoosh!—in comes someone who knocks it completely sideways.
Yet it is relationship that provides the backdrop and framing for the art of our lives, apart from which our colors would simply disperse into the darkness formless and void, awaiting the hovering of the Spirit to collect them and—with Her shades and hues—breathe into us to set them free.
Bad theology is like pornography—the imagination of a real relationship without the risk of one. It tends to be transactional and propositional rather than relational and mysterious. You don’t have to trust Person, or care for Person. It becomes an exercise in self-gratification that ultimately dehumanizes the self and the community of humanity in order to avoid the painful processes of humbling and trusting. Bad theology is not a victimless crime. It dehumanizes God and turns the wonder and the messy mystery of intimate relationship into a centerfold to be used and discarded.
There is a rising rumble, like a midnight train approaching through the wastelands. Not only do we hear it from the distance, but we can feel it if we put our hands on the ground or in the water or in the torn bread and poured-out wine. The rumor in the deep places of our souls is that there is a party going on, and we can scarce trust our invitation. Could there ever be a toast raised to us? Might a hand reach out and lead us into the divine dance, whispering in our ears that we were always made for this? And so we wait for the kiss, the breath in and out that awakens our sleeping hearts to life. We were made for this, utterly found within Relentless Affection!
There is a community of intelligent mystics who are speaking with profound compassion and
authenticity, daring to accept this table fellowship themselves, and reminding us that we, too, received an invitation. Richard Rohr and Mike Morrell are two of these voices, calling us forward and inviting us to actively change what we let into our hearts, calling us to consciously participate in this divine dance of loving and being loved.
We have watched the waters recede over the last few hundred years, and with this came a sense of ebbing hope. But as we challenge and change what we let into our hearts, we realize this: we have not been forsaken or abandoned, and what we thought we were losing was really a gathering. Waters made of many voices rise into a fountain of life that is collecting dreams—of expectancy and chronic wonder and longing love—the cusp of a new reformation and the release of renaissance. As wonderful as revival has been, it has never been enough. We have witnessed the shattering of the old wineskins and watched the bloodred wine be absorbed into the ground. For those with eyes to see, they look out from a towering, rising mass of living water that is about to crash upon this planet. For those whose eyes have not yet been healed—those “born blind”—although we cannot see it, we can feel it coming.
The children of this approaching re-formation of the very ways we think and see will respond quickly and easily. The elders of the empires will take much more work. They are not to be discarded, though, for love never rejects a single bit of bread or drop of wine.
The Divine Dance, along with thousands of other rising voices, is a violation of Empire and a celebration of Relationship. When one has seen the profound mysteries lovingly revealed here, one cannot un-see. When one has heard, there is no going back; suffering cannot wipe away the heart’s smile.
God, You have never had a low view of Humanity.
May our eyes be healed, especially those of us “born blind,” that we might see what You do.
May our ears be opened to the music that heals, celebrating the entanglement of differences so that even in our discord, we hear that we ourselves are the melody embraced in Three-Part Harmony.
May our courage be emboldened to take the risks of trust, to live only inside the grace of one single day, to reach across Empire’s borders and tear down the walls that mask our faces.
May we feel within us the eternal life of Jesus reaching through our hands—to heal, to hold, to hug—and celebrate the bread of our Humanity, the sanctity of the Ordinary and Participation in the Trinity.
As you read these pages and live your lives, may it be so!
—William Paul Young
Author, The Shack, Cross Roads, and Eve
Trinity Sunday, 2016
Introduction:
“Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast”
The Blessed Trinity is supposed to be a central—even the paramount—foundational doctrine of our entire Christian belief system. And yet we’re told, at least I was told as a young boy in Kansas, that we shouldn’t try to understand it.
“Just believe it!” we were admonished. But there it stopped. Irish-born Sister Ephrem just held up the shamrock to my totally trustful third-grade class. We surely believed, if not in the Trinity, at least in her earnest Irish faith. (Although maybe that is exactly how the divine flow has to start! With sharing a bit of earnest and deep goodness.)
Yet it was indeed a mystery. Sort of a mathematical conundrum to test our ability to believe impossible things to be true. You would have thought “believing six impossible things before breakfast” was the actual goal of my pre-Vatican II Catholic training. But later, I found my Protestant friends had approximately the same approach to faith; it merely involved different impossibilities, usually things that happened in the Bible. They didn’t seem to appreciate inner experience too much, either.
And here I am, some sixty years later, presuming to try to breach this impenetrable mystery. Shall we dare to try?
I suppose this is the only real way we can join in the dance…
Trinity: MIA
Let’s begin with the shocking and oft-quoted idea from Karl Rahner, the German Jesuit who was such a major influence at the Second Vatican Council. In his classic study The Trinity, he said, “Christians are, in their practical life, almost mere ‘monotheists.’ We must be willing to admit that, should the doctrine of the Trinity have to be dropped as false, the major part of religious literature could well remain virtually unchanged.”1
We would have to admit this was largely true until William Paul Young wrote his worldwide best-selling novel, The Shack, in the past decade.2 For the first time since fourth-century Cappadocia, the Trinity actually became an inspired subject of conversation and rather pleasant questioning in homes and restaurants. And it continues!
But seventeen centuries of being missing in action—how could this have been true? Could this absence help us understand how we might still be in the infancy stage of Christianity? Could it help explain the simple ineffectiveness and lack of transformation we witness in so much of the Christian world? When you are off at the center, the whole edifice is quite shaky and unsure of itself.
If Trinity is supposed to describe the very heart of the nature of God, and yet it has almost no practical or pastoral implications in most of our lives…if it’s even possible that we could drop it tomorrow and it would be a forgettable, throwaway doctrine…then either it can’t be true or we don’t understand it!
Since you’re reading this, I’m going to guess that, somewhere, you believe it must somehow be true. In the pages that follow, I’m going to simply circle around this most paradoxical idea about the nature of God. And in truth, circling around is actually an apt metaphor for this mystery that we’re trying to apprehend. There is no other way to appreciate mystery.
Remember, mystery isn’t something that you cannot understand—it is something that you can endlessly understand! There is no point at which you can say, “I’ve got it.” Always and forever, mystery gets you!
“Circling around” is all we can do. Our speaking of God is a search for similes, analogies, and metaphors. All theological language is an approximation, offered tentatively in holy awe. That’s the best human language can achieve. We can say, “It’s like—it’s similar to…,” but we can never say, “It is…” because we are in the realm of beyond, of transcendence, of mystery. And 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. Now hold on to this. This is not some new, trendy theology from America. This is about as traditional as you can get. Here it is in the words of 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.3
Here it is: the “circle dance” of the Trinity is very traditional language. And yet if I showed the same courage to use such a risky theatrical word today, I would probably be called New Age, an esoteric—or a heretic.
Yet God is the dance itself, they said!
A Space at God’s Table
Let’s observe this divine dance in an enigmatic story from the very first book of our sacred texts that we call the Bible.
The Lord appeared to Abraham near the great trees of Mamre while he was sitting at the entrance to his tent in the heat of the day. Abraham looked up and saw three men standing nearby. When he saw them, he hurried from the entrance of his tent to meet them and bowed low to the ground.
He said, “If I have found favor in your eyes, my lord, do not pass your servant by. Let a little water be brought, and then you may all wash your feet and rest under this tree. Let me get you something to eat, so you can be refreshed and then go on your way—now that you have come to your servant.”
“Very well,” they answered, “do as you say.”
So Abraham hurried into the tent to Sarah. “Quick,” he said, “get three seahs of the finest flour and knead it and bake some bread.”
Then he ran to the herd and selected a choice, tender calf and gave it to a servant, who hurried to prepare it. He then brought some curds and milk and the calf that had been prepared, and set these before them. While they ate, he stood near them under a tree.4
This account gives us a lot to chew on. The scene is set up as “the Lord” appearing to Abraham, but in the realm of discernable form, those appearing to him are seen as “three men.”
In the centuries of reflection, theology, and storytelling that have followed this original story, these three are often regarded as angels, and perhaps something more. Abraham—bowing low before them—seems to intuitively recognize this something more and invites them to a meal and a rest. He does not join them in the meal but observes them eating from afar, standing “under a tree.” A place at God’s table is still too much to imagine.
Abraham and Sarah seem to see the Holy One in the presence of the three, and their first instinct is one of invitation and hospitality—to create a space of food and drink for them. Here we have humanity still feeding God; it will take a long time to turn that around in the human imagination. “Surely, we ourselves are not invited to this divine table,” they presume.
