by Richard Rohr
This power isn’t solitary, either, but shared—reflecting Trinity. As Croatian theologian Miroslav Volf names it:
Because the Christian God is not a lonely God, but rather a communion of three persons, faith leads human beings into the divine communion. One cannot, however, have a self-enclosed communion with the triune God—a “foursome,” as it were—for the Christian God is not a private deity. Communion with this God is at once also communion with those others who have entrusted themselves in faith to the same God. Hence one and the same act of faith places a person into a new relationship both with God and with all others who stand in communion with God.127
You’ve got to know, however, that shared initiation is not the language of corporate America or of most cultures. This is not the language of the 1 percent, who so often “train” us in how to be and what we ought to want. We have to be taught this deeper wisdom right now, or civilization iill continue in its rapid downward spiral. Surrender, yielding, trusting, and giving are never going to appeal to the ego. Yet we ignore such embedded wisdom at our impending peril.
The life of faith is not at all “believing impossible things to be true”; actually, it is a much more vigilant path of learning how to rest in an Ultimate Love and how to rest in an Infinite Source. On a very practical level, you will then be able to trust that you are being held and guided.
In fact, you can trust after awhile that almost everything is a kind of guidance—absolutely everything.
It’s actually your ability to trust that there is guidance available that allows it to show up as guidance! Amazing circular logic, I know, but don’t dismiss it until you’ve sincerely tried it. I’m confident you’ll come to see it is true in the divine economy of things.
I warn you, though, that when your calculating mind moves into place, you’ll hear yourself appraising these profound moments of judgment: Oh, that’s just a coincidence. That’s merely an accident. It just happened. Or, Blast, why did that happen? Or even, I wish I could change it. Inside the Trinitarian life, you will begin to enjoy what some physicists now call “quantum entanglement” and what others call synchronicity, coincidence, or accident.
When you doubt even the possibility of such things, you’ve just stopped the flow! But if you stay on this path of allowing and trusting, the Spirit in you will allow you to confidently surrender: There’s a reason for this. I’m living as the River flows, carried by the surprise of its/my unfolding. I am being led. Cool it. It’s okay!
Please don’t hear me as adopting a fatalistic approach, as though you can’t work to change or improve your situation. In fact it’s quite the contrary—you can. But I am saying that what first comes to your heart and soul must be a yes and not a no, trust instead of resistance. And when you can lead with your yeses, and allow yourself to see God in all moments, you’ll recognize that such energy is never wasted but always generates life and light. The saints often called this trust in Divine Providence.
Richard of St. Victor and the Joy Supreme
I discovered that our Franciscan St. Bonaventure (1221–1274), who wrote a lot about the Trinity, was highly influenced by a lesser-known figure called Richard of St. Victor (d. 1173). St. Victor was a very influential monastery in Paris in the early medieval period; so many movers and shakers came from this one monastery that they were collectively called “the Victorines.” Many peers kept telling me, “Richard, read Richard!” And so I eventually did. And I’m so glad I did! Here is a short summary of what he develops over two chapters much more beautifully:
For God to be good, God can be one. For God to be loving, God has to be two. Because love is always a relationship, right? But for God to “share excellent joy” and “delight”—and this is where his real breakthrough is—God has to be three, because supreme happiness is when two persons share their common delight in a third something—together.128 All you need to do is witness a couple at the birth of their new baby, and you know this is supremely true.
When I first read Richard of St. Victor, I remembered what I used to say to people when I first started becoming better known from teaching, speaking, writing, and retreat work. There were a lot of people wanting to get close to me all of a sudden, wanting to be my best friend and so forth. How was I supposed to choose between all these new, iould-be friends?
I realized that the people I really loved with great abandon and freedom were not the people who just loved me, but people who loved ihat I loved. People who cared about community, the gospel, the poor, justice, honesty—this is where the flow was easy, natural, and life-giving. But many other people, it seemed, loved me for all the wrong reasons, needed love more than gifted love, were codependent more than offered creative relationship.
Two people excited about the same thing are the beginning of almost everything new, creative, and risky in our world. Surely this is what Jesus meant by his first and most basic definition of church as “two or three gathered.”129
So as we’ve said, we’re moving from a binary map of reality into a ternary map—reality reflecting a pattern of law and a pattern of three.130
I think every one of us has a certain resistance to a ternary map because our whole lives have been formed by binary oppositions. We think in that way. In my book The Naked Now, I call it the “dualistic mind.” Most people fight back and forth between either/or binaries—just look at our political parties. The one with the loudest voice appears to win, but then you always go away dissatisfied, feeling you have been cheated. And you have been.
At the Center for Action and Contemplation, we try to practice what we call Third Way approaches to conflict, problem-solving, and creativity. You almost have to let “the two” fail you. You almost have to die to them. You almost have to be willing to be disappointed in both of them.
But what most people do—I think to reassure their egos and their need to be right—is to take a stand mightily on one side and make a god out of their ideology, religion, or partial truth. But this comes at such a cost! It’s such a defeat for intelligence, for wisdom, for depth, for truth.
Stridently taking sides in a binary system has nothing to do with truth. The gospel itself is neither liberal nor conservative but severely critiques both sides of this false choice. The true good news of Jesus will never fill stadiums, because dualistic masses can never collectively embrace an enlightened “Third Way,” which, contemplatively speaking, always feels a bit like nothing, because in this position you are indeed like Jesus—you have “no place to lay your head.”131
Just like the mystery of the Father.
Just like the crucifixion of the Son.
Just like the anonymity of the Spirit.
There are commonly two kinds of human beings: there are people who want certitude and there are people who want understanding; and these two cannot understand one another! Really.
Those who demand certitude out of life will insist on it even if it doesn’t fit the facts. Logic has nothing to do with it. Truth has nothing to do with it. “Don’t bother me with the truth—I’ve already come to my conclusion!” If you need certitude, you will come to your conclusion. You will surround yourself with your conclusion.
The very meaning of faith stands in stark contrast to this mind-set. Do you know why I think Jesus (or any of the Three) is actually dangerous if taken outside of the Trinity? It’s because we then ill-define faith as a very static concept instead of a dynamic and flowing one.
We’ve turned faith into a right to certitude when, in fact, this Trinitarian mystery is whispering quite the opposite: we have to live in exquisite, terrible humility before reality. In this space, God gives us a spirit of questing, a desire for understanding; it seems to me it’s only this ongoing search for understanding that will create compassionate people—and wise people.
If you think you have a right to certitude, then show me where the gospel ever promised you that or offered you that. The New Tes
tament itself is written in a language Jesus never spoke. If God wanted us to have evidence, rational proof, and perfect clarity, the incarnation of Jesus would have been delayed till the invention of audio recorders and video cameras.
Rational certitude is exactly what the Scriptures do not offer us. They offer us something much better and an entirely different way of knowing: an intimate relationship, a dark journey, a path where we must discover for ourselves that grace, love, mercy, and forgiveness are absolutely necessary for survival—in an always and forever uncertain world. You only need enough clarity and ground to know how to live without certitude! Yes, we really are saved by faith. People who live in this way never stop growing, are not easily defeated, and are frankly fun to live with.
Dave Andrews, an Australian teacher, theologian, activist, and community organizer, puts a contemporary and communal twist on Richard of St. Victor’s illuminating maxim:
It takes one person to be an individual. It takes two people to make a couple. And it takes at least three people to make a community. I like to use the English word “trey,” derived from the French word “trei” meaning “three,” as a simple, short memorable word for the “threesome”...that creates an exponential explosion in potential—not only in the quantity, but also the quality—of relationships. A trey creates the possibility for people to go beyond personal interest. It is, they say, the beginning of a sense of common cause—a collective purpose—beyond what suits individual interests. A trey creates the stability and security that is essential for community.…
Because the ultimate reality of the universe, depicted in the Trinity, is a community of persons in relation to one another, we know the trey is the only way it is possible for people to relate to one another with the individuality of one, the reciprocity of two, and the stability, subjectivity and objectivity of three.”132
The Paradox of Restlessness and Contentment
The authentic Christian life and living inside the flow of Trinity are the same thing—and this flow will always be characterized by two seemingly contradictory things. First, you’re going to be constantly yearning and longing for more, the way the Three endlessly desire to give themselves and flow outward. It’s a kind of sacred discontent, a holy dissatisfaction, and a holy desire for more life, love, and generativity.
This does not arrive, however, out of a sense of emptiness or scarcity, but precisely because you have touched upon deep contentment and abundance. There’s always still more I can do, more I can include and experience; there are more people I can serve. There is more that God wants to give me, and more God wants to ask of me. Any of these will show themselves at different times in the life of a mature Christian. Never “I am fully there, and I have it all.” A person who is smug is not inside the Trinitarian flow. How can fullness and still yearning for more so beautifully coexist? I have no answer to that, but I know it to be true.
In the life of the Trinity, you can always rest inside a certain kind of deep contentment: it’s all foundationally good and okay. This moment is as perfect as it can be, and I do not need to state my preferences moment by moment, make my judgments or demands, or write my commentary on everything. The judging mind keeps me split and divided from union. This is surely what Paul is referring to when he says of the Christ that “his nature is all Yes.”133 This is the peace the world cannot give nor take away.134 If a person is not fundamentally resting in the Eternal Sabbath, they are not yet living inside the Trinitarian flow.
There’s good news here: all emotional snags, temptations, and mental disruptions are the negative capability for this very peace; they invite you to choose again, and each time, you increase your freedom. Trust me on that.
A Trinitarian life is able, therefore, to hold a beautiful kind of creative tension in this world: not afraid to be dependent, while also not afraid to be self-sufficient; able to be self and able to be other—all modeled in the standing lesson of the Trinity. Returning to our thirteenth-century Franciscan philosopher-theologian John Duns Scotus, he called this the harmony of goodness: true love for the self always overflows into love for the other; it is one and the same flow. And your freedom to extend love to others always gives you a sense of dignity and power of your own self. It is such a paradox.
In fact, you cannot have one without the other. Trying to love others without a foundational reverence for yourself ends up as neediness, manipulation, and unsustainable infatuation, expressing itself in endless battles of codependency. Trying to love yourself and not to love others is what we mean by narcissism; this is most dangerous when it takes the form of religious narcissism, which uses even God for its own self-aggrandizement.135
You cannot know things if you don’t first of all grant them a foundational respect, if you don’t love them before you grab them with your mind. This is surely what Genesis warns us against from the beginning, in archetypal Eden:136 you’ll eat voraciously from that forbidden tree of knowledge before you know how to respect and honor what you are eating, which creates very entitled and proud people. All of life becomes a commodity for our consumption.
Paul summarizes this pattern well: “Knowledge puffs up, whereas love builds up. Some may think they have full knowledge of something yet not know it as they ought to know things.”137 Godly knowing is a humble and non-grasping kind of knowledge; it becomes a beautiful process of communion instead of ammunition and power over. It is basically reverence! Knowing without loving is frankly dangerous for the soul and for society. You’ll critique most everything you encounter and even have the hubris to call this mode of reflexive cynicism “thinking” (whereas it’s really your ego’s narcissistic reaction to the moment). You’ll position things too quickly as inferior or superior, “with me” or “against me,” and most of the time you’ll be wrong.
To eat of the tree that promises to give you divine knowledge of good and evil is the tree of death.138 All human knowing is “imperfect” and “[seen] through a glass, darkly,”139 and must necessarily be held with humility and patience.
Yet God takes the freedom and immense risk of allowing us to “eat of all the trees in the garden.”140 We are even allowed to “pick from the tree of life too, and eat and live for ever.”141 The only ones who “must not be allowed to eat” of this tree are precisely those who arrogantly think they are “like one of us in knowing good from evil.”142 This is the basic human hubris. An amazing insight! The Genesis text seems to know that such arrogant human knowing will never lead to life for humans, but only death. (Don’t let anyone tell you that the creation accounts in Genesis are not profoundly inspired. Note that YHWH again uses the plural in referring to Godself (“one of us”), which is quite amazing in a monotheistic religion.
We live in a world ihere naked knowledge of facts is allowed to have all the sway and all the say. We have many knowledgeable people with doctoral degrees, and technocrats with huge amounts of information. But we have such precious little ability to use this knowledge surplus for the good of the world, or anything really but private superiority. They’re probably not bad people at all; but what they might lack is the awareness that all being, modeled on the Trinity, is “good, true, and beautiful” (in Scholastic philosophy, these are called the “three transcendental qualities of being”), and therefore always loveable on some level.
This was John Duns Scotus’s doctrine of “the univocity of being,” which became the continuing Franciscan opinion.143 We can speak of all levels of being with “one voice”—from plants, to animals, to humans, to God. I hope you recognize what a breakthrough that is for all poets, mystics, and seers: all is entirely lovable even before it is fully knowable. (The opposite “Dominican” opinion taught that things must be known as true before they can be loved.)
Body-Based Knowing
We are called to embody the love of God in our lives. Not just talk about it or think about it or pray about it. We must live it in our guts, our muscles, our hearts, our
eyes, our ears, and our tongues. We manifest that love when we share the ordinary rhythm of life with others who are likewise seeking to grow in love and compassion. Such love naturally expresses itself communally, even within God: Christians recognize in God a trinity of persons, traditionally called the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; it is their self-giving love for one another that, in Dante’s words, “moves the sun and other stars.”144
The basic “sacramental principle” is this: we can know spiritual things through the physical world and bodily actions.
I remember in my sacramental theology class in seminary in the 1960s, old Father Luke teaching us how to baptize. He was quite a rigid type, and was giving us all the things we could do right and wrong in baptizing, yet the only thing he finally insisted on was this: the water had to flow. If the water didn’t flow at all, if it was not seemingly “living water,” people weren’t officially baptized. The usual arguments were over the correct words, but without knowing it I think rigid old Father Luke was right.
Baptism is a risky, body-based symbol of being drowned or buried145 in the flow, and it is most telling that the official formula with almost all churches was insistently Trinitarian. You were not baptized in the name of Jesus, but precisely “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” based on Matthew 28:19. Of course, all lives are objectively in the flow to begin with, but baptism was ideally the rite of passage coinciding with your subjective realization and the beginnings of positive appreciation of the same. As with most sacramental moments, they seldom match the exact moment of transformation itself, but at least they declare that such a moment is important and possible.
And then we have this wonderful body language (a “yoga” of sorts) practiced by the older churches that we call “the sign of the cross.” This will be further treated in the “Experiencing the Trinity: Seven Practices” section at the back of the book, but I want to give you a taste of this practice right now. Many of us have been doing this ever since we were little children, while others from other Christian traditions have never done it, believing it extraneous at best and superstitious at worst. If you’ve never enacted the sign of the cross before, I hope you’ll consider its value. And if you’re familiar (perhaps overfamiliar) with the practice, I hope you can do it now in a conscious and trustful way.
