The Divine Dance

by Richard Rohr

  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. Sntie 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 antis 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. What is it about this diversity that’s so intrinsic to Trinity’s DNA? Read on.

  The Delight of Diversity

  One of the most wonderful things I find in this naming of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is its affirmation that there is an intrinsic plurality to goodness. Just hold on to that, all right?

  Goodness isn’t sameness. Goodness, to be goodness, needs contrast and tension, not perfect uniformity. If Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all God yet clearly different, and ie embrace this differentiation, resisting the temptation to blend them into some kind of amorphous blob, then there are at least three shapes to pure goodness. (And of course, probably more.)

  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 antis 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 antour 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—what poets and dramatists often name tragic beauty.

  Don’t feel bad about this. Look at the cross.

  Is that not a tragic beauty? Is that not what we are?

  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 othe
r 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.

  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. Please don’t jump to the conclusion, though, that God doesn’t love (and indeed like) all those who are “in and of” the system. They just suffer from divided loyalties. That said, they can be good homing devices—sometimes much better than those of us who pretend we are outside or above the system.

  And if you’re truly “saved”—that is, living loved and living liberated—you know what makes this evident? It’s precisely your ability to 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. I don’t care how many services you pack out. I don’t care how many ministries you serve with. I don’t care how many commandments you’ve obeyed. You’re not enlightened, transformed, saved—pick your religious safety word—you still don’t trust the Mystery.

  But 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.

  Reshaping Our Image

  Please don’t begin with some notion of abstract being and then say, Okay, we found out through Jesus that such a being is loving.

  No, 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; the final direction of history is inevitably directed toward resurrection as Alpha becomes Omega,74 as both Bonaventure and Teilhard de Chardin would put it. This is much of what I talk about in my earlier books Immortal Diamond and Eager to Love, if you want to pursue this point further.75

  But let’s siitch shapes; I know using geometrical figures sometimes helps us to think differently. Those of us who grew up with the pre-Trinitarian notion of God probably saw reality, consciously or unconsciously, as a pyramid-shaped universe, with God at the top of the triangle and all else beneath. Most Christian art and church design and architecture reflects this pyramidal worldview, which shows what little influence Trinity has had in our history.

  I’m not saying the pyramid is entirely wrong. 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.77

  This even fits the “dynamic” metaphysical principle that “the interweaving of the three [always] produces a fourth” on another level.78

  Sure, this may sound like heresy—especially to a contracted heart that wants to go it alone. But 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.80