by Richard Rohr
This unique and multifaceted story inspired an equally unique and multifaceted piece of devotional religious art entitled The Hospitality of Abraham—also called, simply (and for reasons we’ll get into) The Trinity.
I believe all genuine art is sacred. Self-consciously “religious” art is often trying too hard and descends into cheap sentiment. But the particular form of artistic expression The Trinity belongs to—the icon—attempts to point beyond itself, inviting in its viewers a sense of both the beyond and the communion that exists in our midst.
Created by Russian iconographer Andrei Rublev in the fifteenth century, The Trinity is the icon of icons for many of us—and, as I would discover years after first encountering it, even more invitational than most. By my lights, it is the most perfect piece of religious art there is; I’ve always had a copy of it hanging in my room. The original is still on display in the Tretyakov gallery in Moscow.
There’s a story told that one artist became a follower of Jesus just from gazing at this icon, exclaiming, “If that’s the nature of God, then I’m a believer.” And I can fully understand this.
In Rublev’s icon there are three primary colors, which illustrate facets of the Holy One, all contained in the Three.
Rublev considered gold the color of “the Father”—perfection, fullness, wholeness, the ultimate Source.
He considered blue the color of “the Human”—both sea and sky mirroring one another—and therefore God in Christ taking on the world, taking on humanity. Thus, Rublev pictures the Christ as blue, displaying his two fingers to tell us that he has put spirit and matter, divinity and humanity, together within himself—and for us!
And then 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.
Hildegard was likely inspired by the lushness of her surroundings at her Rhineland monastery, which I was recently able to visit. Rublev, in similar reverence for the natural world, chose green to represent, as it were, 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?
A (W)hole in God
As magnificent as this icon—and this fellowship—is…there’s something missing.
They’re circling a shared table, and if you look on the front of the table there appears to be a little rectangular hole painted there. Most people just pass right over it, but art historians say that the remaining glue on the original icon indicates that there was perhaps once a mirror glued to the front of the table!
If you don’t come from an Orthodox, Catholic, or Anglican background, this might not strike you as odd, but you should know that this is a most unusual feature for an icon. One would normally not put a real mirror on the front of a holy icon. If so, it is entirely unique and courageous.
This might have been Rublev’s final design flourish. Or maybe it was added later—we’re not sure.
But can you imagine what its meaning might be?
It’s stunning when you think about it—there was room at this table for a fourth.
The observer.
You!
At the heart of Christian revelation, 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.
But even this Three-Fullness does not like to eat alone. This invitation to share at the divine table is probably the first biblical hint of what we would eventually call “salvation.”
Jesus comes forth from this Eternal Fullness, allowing us to see ourselves mirrored, as a part of this table fellowship—as a participant at this banquet and as a partner in God’s eternal dance of love and communion.
The mirror seems to have been lost over the centuries, both in the icon and in our on-the-ground understanding of who God is and who we therefore are, created in God’s “image and likeness.”5
My fondest hope would be that these pages would reposition you in the mirror of divine fellowship, with a place at the table.
I want you to take this image into yourself as you read. I invite you to recognize that this Table is not reserved exclusively for the Three, nor is the divine circle dance a closed circle: we’re all invited in. All creation is invited in, and this is the liberation God intended from the very beginning.
This divine intention—this audacious invitation—is embedded in creation itself;6 it later becomes concrete, personal, and touchable in Jesus.7 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?
Then let’s begin to explore both how and why!
* * *
1. Karl Rahner, The Trinity (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1999), 10–11.
2. William Paul Young, The Shack (Newbury Park, CA: Windblown Media, 2007).
3. Elias Marechal, Tears of an Innocent God (New York: Paulist Press, 2015), 7.
4. Genesis 18:1–8 (niv).
5. See Genesis 1:26–27.
6. See John 1:1–18; Colossians 1:15–20; Ephesians 1:3–14; Romans 1:20; 8:18–25.
7. See, for example, 1 John 1:1–3; Hebrews 1:1–3.
8. See, for example, Ephesians 1:3–4.
9. See Richard Rohr, Eager to Love (Cincinnati, OH: Franciscan Media, 2014), app. I, 209, which explores how Christ and Jesus are two different but overlapping truths.
10. See Genesis 1:10–31.
11. See Jeremiah 31:33; Hebrews 8:10; 10:16.
Part I
Wanted: A Trinitarian Revolution
Spiritual Paradigm Shift
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.14
Before you try to figure out why I started this section with these three separate citations about a very active and involved God, let me try to explain. And all I can ever do is try.
In his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn popularized the word “paradigm shift.”15 He made clear that even in the scientific field
, 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”!16
At the risk of sounding like I am making a serious overstatement, I think the common Christian image of God, despite Jesus, is still largely “pagan” (not that pagans are bad people, by the way!) and untransformed.
What do I mean by this? 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. This shift has been subtly yet profoundly underway for some time, hiding in plain sight—the revelation of God as what we have always called “Trinity” but have barely understood (in the beginning was the Relationship).
This slowly-dawning Christian revelation was supposed to have radically changed our image of God, but for the most part it did not. The old wiring was just too much in place. It has taken us two thousand years to try to make this shift; but now history, mental health, so many negative and angry Christians, cosmology, and quantum physics are quickly demanding it of us.
Kuhn said that paradigm shifts become necessary when the plausibility structure of the previous paradigm becomes so full of holes and patchwork “fixes” that a complete overhaul, which once looked utterly threatening, now appears as a lifeline.
I believe we’re at precisely such a moment when it comes to our images of God. Instead of the idea of Trinity being an abstruse conundrum, it could well end up being the answer to the foundational problem of Western religion.
Instead of God being the Eternal Threatener, we have God as the Ultimate Participant—in everything—both the good and the painful.
Let me try to describe the two paradigms in stark contrast.
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.
Unless God’s seers can begin to make this paradigm shift, there is no way that God is going to be able to “save the world.” Courtroom scenes and penal systems do not inspire or change the world. They are totally inadequate to communicate the Divine Banquet and invitation; in fact, they make it largely impossible to imagine. 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.
Yes, God is saving the world, and God goes on working even though we fail to notice, fail to enjoy, fail to pass on, and fail to fully live our one and only life. We become like the small god we have too often worshipped, and thus spectators at our own funeral.
How about this, instead:
There is only Christ: he is everything and he is in everything.24
When Christ is [fully] revealed—and he is your life—you too will be revealed in all your glory with him.25
A revolution is already underway; the old plausibility structures of divinity are diminishing; so much of religion is in rigor mortis. Are we ready to let go of what’s no longer working and embrace the paradigm that has always been emerging and is always too much for us? As St. Augustine said, this God is “ever ancient and ever new.”
If my instincts are right, this unearthing of Trinity can’t come a moment too soon. Because I’m convinced that beneath the ugly manifestations of our present evils—political corruption, ecological devastation, warring against one another, hating each other based on race, gender, religion, or sexual orientation—the greatest dis-ease facing humanity right now is our profound and painful sense of disconnection.
Disconnection from God, certainly, but also from ourselves (
our bodies), from each other, and from our world.
Our sense of this fourfold isolation is plunging us as a culture—as a species—into increasingly destructive behavior. While our world is not as doom and gloom as those who feed on a steady diet of cable TV and social media-driven “bad news” might conclude, it’s true that the sheer scope and complexity of our disconnection is staggering.
I’m discovering that the gift of the Trinity—and our practical, felt experience of receiving this gift—offers a grounded reconnection with God, self, others, and world that all religion and spirituality, and arguably, even politics, is aiming for—but which conventional religion, spirituality, and politics fall short of.
The religion, spirituality, and politics of worthiness games, belonging barriers, and achievement rewards will never be the cure: these are in fact part of the dis-ease. But 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.
Are you ready to explore how a shift in our perspective from God as “removed one” to God as “most moved Mover,”26 intimately participating in ongoing co-creation, makes such a joyous re-union possible?
If so, welcome to The Divine Dance. In these pages, we will indeed get to know the Trinity and the transformation of all things—including yourself.
Dusting Off a Daring Doctrine
Let me tell you a bit about how I came to more consciously participate in the divine dance. Some years ago, I had a wonderful extended time in a hermitage in Arizona during Lent. My main practices while there were to pay attention, listen, and keep a journal. Toward the end of my time there, I decided the appropriate thing to do would be to read through the journal that I’d kept to see if God had taught me anything; I wanted to see if there was any pattern to the unfolding of those wonderful and lonely days.
