by Richard Rohr
I went up to the Center Library, some distance from the hermitage, and there on a table was the late Catherine Mowry LaCugna’s heady book entitled God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life.27 It’s a big book filled with footnotes, and it looked formidable. Even so, I felt a great urging toward it, even though I hadn’t intended to read anything except the Bible during this sojourn.
So instead of reading my journal in those final hermitage days, I began to slowly read this highly academic book. As I read, while catching only glimpses of understanding, I still kept saying, “Yes, yes!” to new words and only slightly-captured ideas. I felt the presence of a Big Tradition, which the author was tracing, naming the same inner dynamism that had been growing in me for thirty-some days. It was no longer an abstract idea, a doctrine, or a shelved “belief” but almost a phenomenology of my own—and others’—inner experience of God.
Trinity was not a belief but a very objective way of describing my own deep inner experience of Transcendence—and what I call here flow! Yet the conviction came from within now, and it was nothing like conforming to anything imposed from the outside. Was I kidding myself? How could such seeming objectivity and such personal subjectivity coincide so well within me?
This is it, I felt. This sums up what I think I’ve experienced during this hermitage time, and maybe throughout my life. Something was resonating, even through this heavy and often boring book (which I wouldn’t even recommend unless you have some background in theology). Yet I could not put it down until I finished it the very last day of my alone time.
I had broken my intention not to read, and yet this did not feel like reading at all but being let in on a secret—a secret that I myself was.
I drove out of Arizona with a grateful inner smile, taking full, fresh breaths of the clean desert air. I much more consciously enjoyed the flow that I now saw flowing everywhere.
I’m sure this is the ultimate presumption: to think that I could understand or have anything to say about this life in the Trinity. And yet, I also feel we must use the language and experience that is available to us rather than remain silent.
I would ask you, if possible, to sink into this. Maybe this book will be more of a meditation than a scholarly treatise.
But from a deeper place, if you can allow it, my prayer and desire is that something you encounter in these pages will 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.
Math Problems
Once taken for granted in Western civilization, “God” is now one of the most contested ideas we have. Debates have been argued and wars have been waged and hearts have been broken over trying to own, define, or even relate to this being—or get over its (non)existence.
Perhaps the way out of this cultural impasse is in:
What’s going on inside of God?
How does this life express itself—manifest itself—in the dance of creation?
Followers of Jesus have long wrestled with this question in the context of God as a unity in diversity.
A Trinity…
But God is one!28
This is the great affirmation of the three great monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. But after Jesus, most Christians defect for all practical purposes, saying, “Well, God is most perfectly revealed as Three, but he is still really One!” No wonder our Jewish ancestors were confused and said it sounded like gobbledygook to them, and a major threat to monotheism—and it came from one of their very own! Maybe this was just a mathematical conundrum? Or simply pure heresy from some esoteric group?
Not exactly One, Christian mystics and teachers attempt to explain, and yet perfectly One; not exactly Three but yet Three, too! No wonder it took us three centuries to even find a word to describe such a nonsensical image of God. Note this for now: the principle of one is lonely; the principle of two is oppositional and moves you toward preference; the principle of three is inherently moving, dynamic, and generative.
In our efforts to explain Trinity, we tried the shamrock; we tried three faces on one person; we tried water, ice, and steam. We tried everything we could to try to resolve what is called the “first philosophical problem” of the one and the many. By the fourth century, the Cappadocian Fathers (Gregory of Nyssa, Basil of Caesarea, and Gregory Nazianzen) and other mystics felt they had come to a resolution of the problem; this inspired the creation of a new language that has lasted to this day.
In effect, they said, 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, which is frankly why it still sounds foreign to most of the Western churches.
All we know experientially is the flow itself. The drama was set in motion and has never stopped. The principle of three became the operative principle of the universe, and it undercut all dualistic thinking. Its full, cataclysmic implications are still slow in breaking into history.29
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. Any retributive justice projected onto God is seen through the lens of outpouring Trinity as undone by God’s mercy, and is reframed rightly as restorative justice, as taught by all the major prophets and many of the minor ones, too.
The Trinitarian revelation was supposed to change everything, but very few Christians allowed themselves to experience this cleansing flow.
The Relationship Is the Vehicle
Why do we get so hung up on divine math problems? At the risk of being a little abstract, let me give you my interpretation of how we got into this problem. We owe a great deal of our Western thinking to one wonderful, brilliant man called Aristotle. It’s amazing how one human being could have put together the foundations for what became so many of the structures of Western thought.
Aristotle taught that there were ten different qualities to all things. I’m not going to list all ten of them; two will suffice. He said there was “substance” and there was “relationship.” What defined substance was that it was independent of all else—so a tree is a substance, whereas “father” is a relationship. Do you understand the distinction he’s drawing?
“Son” is also a relationship, whereas stone is a substance. Now, Aristotle ranked substance the highest. This is typical Greek thinking. Substance is that which is “independent” of all else and can stand on its own. It isn’t an adjective; it’s a noun. Nouns are higher than adjectives.
So what the West found itself doing in the earliest traditions, by the second and third century CE, was trying to build on Aristotle to prove that this God whom we had come to understand as Trinitarian was a substance. We didn’t want an ephemeral old relationship God, you k
now. We wanted a substantial God whom we could prove was as good as anybody else’s God! (We Catholics did the same thing with our unfortunate definition of the transubstantiation of the bread and wine at the Mass.)
Yet 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.32
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-made man.”
Unfortunately, this doesn’t end with Aristotle. This Western hyper-individualism lays down deep roots in Latin, or Western, Christianity. Augustine comes along in the fourth and fifth centuries, describing Trinity as God in three substances united as one. By the next century, God is one substance who happens to have three relationships. Aquinas comes along in the thirteenth century saying that God is one substance, but the relationships (and he’s getting closer) constitute the very nature of that substance. Ah, that’s about it. He called it subsistent relationship.
Now we are prepared to say that God is not, nor does God need to be, “substance” in that historic Aristotelian sense of something independent of all else but, in fact, 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.
People who are toxic, psychopathic, or sociopathic are always those who cannot maintain relationships, who cannot sustain relationships. They run from them. Usually, either they are loners or they make all relating with them very difficult. Surely you know ten such people.
I once met a psychiatrist who made a statement to me that I thought at first was an overstatement. He’s older than I am, and he said, “Richard, at the end of your life, you’ll realize that every mentally ill person you’ve ever worked with is basically lonely.”
“Oh, come on, that’s a little glib, isn’t it?” I replied.
“Oh, I admit, there are probably physical reasons for some mental illness, but loneliness is what activates it.”
I’ve run this theory by several psychiatrist friends. After they get over their initial stunned objection—“Oh, come on. That’s too simple”—they agree! 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.”33
Now let’s try to convince you that this being whom we call God is, in fact, loving. We haven’t had very good success at this, right? In my decades of priesthood, I’ve observed that the vast majority of Christians are afraid of God. In my now broad and worldwide experience, I do not find most Christians to be naturally more loving than those of other faiths. We just think we are! It’s rather disappointing to find this out, but it’s inevitable if you’re basically relating to this God out of fear and if your religion is, by and large, fire insurance just in case the whole thing turns out to be real.
You’re not really in this dance. You haven’t crawled into bed to sleep between your divine Parents.
Now do you see why we picture the Holy Spirit as a dove or as the wind? You can’t capture that as easily, can you?
The best we could do was metaphor.
Once more, all religious language is metaphor—I hope you know that. It’s the best we can do. We’re like blind people touching the side of an elephant, describing the tiny portion we feel with all the conviction we can muster.
But the Spirit was always the hardest to describe, and even Jesus acknowledges this: The Spirit blows where it will;34 don’t try to control the Spirit by saying where the Spirit comes from, where the Spirit goes, or who definitely “has” the Spirit. God has many that the churches do not have, and the churches have many that God does not have.
Metaphors Be with You!
The Greek root of the word metaphor means “to carry across” a meaning—to get from one place to another. The paradox is, all metaphors by necessity walk with a limp. And yet, metaphors carry a substantial—and needed—load. I offer you the wisdom of the Canadian writer Donald Braun, who says at the beginning of his book The Journey from Ennuied, “That which is belittled in plain speech finds the respect it warrants in the subtleties of metaphor.”35
So metaphor is the only possible language available to us when we speak of God, and surely when we dare to speak of the mystery of Trinity. We have already begun to speak metaphorically about the “circle dance.” Let’s try another image:
God is like a rubber band.
Years ago, I was in a hotel room preparing for a major conference where I was asked to reflect on the life of God as Trinity. I found myself sharing what is essentially the book you’re holding.
Before I left my room that day, I prayed, Okay God, I want to say something that is somehow true and even compelling. Please keep me out of the way. At the end of the prayer, I looked down on the floor, and at the bottom of the bedstead I saw an ordinary rubber band; there it was, on an otherwise clean rug, glaring at me. They should have cleaned the room that morning, but I have to believe it was there for a reason. I left the room in confidence, knowing I had a new and helpful metaphor for what I wanted to say.
When I pull a rubber band outward, a centrifugal force is created; I expand my fingers and the rubber band stretches with them. And soon, an opposite motion occurs—the very thing that pulls the rubber band outward (in this case my thumb and index finger) finds itself included within it. A centripetal force then acts to pull what is included back to the center. It’s one complete motion—moving out and allowing oneself to be pulled back in.
Now remember, in the New Testament, no one used the w
ord Trinity. It wasn’t until the third century that Tertullian (150–240), sometimes called “the founder of Western Christian theology,” first coined this word Trinity from the Latin trinitas, meaning “triad,” or trinus, meaning “threefold.” Again, the word itself is not found in the Bible; it took history awhile to find a proper word for this always-elusive “rubber band.”
But this doesn’t mean the experience itself wasn’t present from the earliest days of the Christian era. Already in the New Testament, 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.
These multiple namings of divinity were very confusing for many readers of the Gospels, and even are to this day. I’m amazed that John’s early gospel speaks so readily and with seeming ease in this direction—both from and to Jewish monotheists, at that! How did we arrive at such a mystical ability to speak with almost no precedents in this regard? And with such quiet confidence? Only if there was deep inner experience of the same.
We see that even Jesus is looking for metaphors, for possible language to try to describe his own inner dynamic. We can find, hiding in plain sight, his natural and lovely way of knowing reality—passed on to his earliest apprentices and, by extension, to us.
A Mirrored Universe
Like probably nothing else, all authentic knowledge of God is participatory knowledge. I must say this directly and clearly because it is a very different way of knowing reality—and it should be the unique, open-horizoned gift of people of faith. But we ourselves have almost entirely lost this way of knowing, ever since the food fights of the Reformation and the rationalism of the Enlightenment, leading to fundamentalism on the Right and atheism or agnosticism on the Left.
