by Richard Rohr
120. To read a fascinating account of how the development of language out of farming practices influenced our naming of God, see Leonard Shlain’s The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image (New York: Penguin Books, 1999).
121. For a listing of over a hundred feminine images of God in Scripture with references, see http://mikemorrell.org/2012/05/biblical-proofs-for-the-feminine-face-of-God-in-scripture.
122. See Isaiah 42:1–9; 49:1–13; 50:4–9; 52:13–53:12.
123. See the great kenotic hymn of Philippians 2:6–7.
124. See Luke 24:49.
125. See Richard Rohr, Adam’s Return (Chestnut Ridge, NY: Crossroad Publishing Company, 2004).
126. Genesis 1:3.
127. Miroslav Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1997), 173.
128. See Richard of St. Victor: The Book of the Patriarchs, The Mystical Ark, Book Three of the Trinity (Classics of Western Spirituality) (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1979), 387–389.
129. See Matthew 18:20 (niv, nkjv, kjv).
130. See Bourgeault, The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three.
131. See Luke 9:58.
132. Dave Andrews, A Divine Society: The Trinity, Community, and Society (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2012), 18–19. Emphasis is in the original. Previously published in 2008 by Frank Communications of Queensland, Australia.
133. 2 Corinthians 1:20.
134. See John 14:27; 16:33.
135. See 1 John 2:9–11.
136. See Genesis 2:17.
137. See 1 Corinthians 8:1–2.
138. See Genesis 2:17.
139. 1 Corinthians 13:12 (kjv).
140. Genesis 2:16.
141. Genesis 3:22.
142. Genesis 3:22.
143. See Rohr, Eager to Love, chapter 13, “John Duns Scotus: Anything but a Dunce.”
144. Carl McColman, Befriending Silence: Discovering the Gifts of Cistercian Spirituality (Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press, 2015), 83–84.
145. See, for example, Romans 6:3–5; Colossians 2:12–13.
146. See Acts 17:28.
147. http://www.bartleby.com/122/36.html.
148. http://www.bartleby.com/122/24.html.
149. See St. John of the Cross, “The Living Flame of Love,” stanza 4, in The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh, O.C.D. and Otilio Rodriguez, O.C.D. (Washington, DC: ICS [Institute of Carmelite Studies] Publications, 1973), 579. Translation of Obras de San Juan de la Cruz. Reprint; previously published in 1964 by Doubleday. “How gently and lovingly You wake in my heart, Where in secret You dwell alone; And in Your sweet breathing, filled with good and glory, How tenderly You swell my heart with love.”
150. See also, for example, Matthew 9:9–13; Luke 14:15–24.
151. Psalm 139:7–8 (niv).
152. Haldane, “Possible Worlds.”
153. In the words of the classic hymn “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” by Robert Robinson, 1758.
154. Philippians 3:20 (niv, nkjv).
155. See, for example, Romans 12:2; John 16:3; Philippians 2:5.
156. Several contemporary teachers who teach this iell—albeit under various names and precise approaches—would be John Main, Thomas Keating, Pema Chodron, Michael Singer, Eckhart Tolle, Michael Brown in his book The Presence Process, and Martin Laird. Each of them can change your life—by practices wherein you know things for yourself, and not by teaching you any doctrines to agree or disagree with.
157. See Exodus 25:10–22 (nkjv, kjv).
158. Exodus 25:22.
159. See Romans 8:26–27.
160. See, for example, Romans 8:16.
161. See Philippians 4:6–7.
162. See Luke 1:38 (jb).
163. See John 14:17 and, really, all over the place.
164. See Genesis 2:1.
165. See Genesis 2:19.
166. See Genesis 2:22.
167. Romans 8:21.
168. Romans 8:22 (jb).
169. If the idea of a robust, fully Christian embrace and appreciation of evolution intrigues you, or even makes you nervous, I highly recommend that you check out the work of Ilia Delio, especially The Emergent Christ (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011) and The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution, and the Power of Love (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013).
170. Genesis 2:20.
171. Genesis 1:11.
172. See, for example, Revelation 12:10; John 8:44.
173. See Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence (New York: Harmony Crown Publishing Group [Penguin Random House], 2013).
174. Leonardo Boff, Holy Trinity, Perfect Community, trans. Phillip Berryman (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2000), 109–110. Italics are in the original.
175. Richard Rohr, “Trinity Prayer,” 2005.
Part II
Why the Trinity? Why Now?
Three Reasons for Recovery
There are three reasons that make the rediscovery and re-appreciation of Trinity so important and timely at this very moment in history, but these are quite different from the fourth century arguments that made the relations of the Trinity a topic for barroom brawls. (Can you imagine that happening now? Oh, you have been to the “Comments” sections of most websites—never mind!)
1. The Humility of Transcendence. The human individuation process has come to a very refined sense of interiority, inner experience, psychological sophistication, and interface with what authentic religion is really saying. Up to now, most of the arguing has been about accidentals and externals, which is what Carl Jung criticized in the barren Christianity that was presented to him, an experience echoed in so many others. Trinity offers us a much deeper phenomenology of our inner experience of Transcendence, on a very different plane than the argumentative mind of the last five hundred years. Trinity will change your prayer life, and in fact maybe introduce you to it!
2. A Broadened Theological Vocabulary. The globalization of knowledge, our increased interface with other world religions (especially the other hemisphere of the brain represented by both Eastern Christianity and Eastern religions on the whole), along with our new interface with science, all demand that we broaden our theological vocabulary. Ironically, this is leading us back to our oldest tradition of Trinity—this allows us to take each of these new contacts quite seriously while giving us an entirely orthodox way of staying in the full human conversation.
3. An Expanded Understanding of Jesus and “the Christ.” By essentially extracting Jesus from the Trinity, and attempting to understand Jesus apart from the Cosmic Christ, we have created a very earthbound, atonement-based Christology that will utterly fall apart if and when, for example, we discover life on other planets. We’ve tried to love Jesus without loving (or even knowing) the Christ, and it has created an unhealthy tribal, competitive form of religion instead of Paul’s, “There is only Christ: he is everything and he is in everything.”176 “The Christ” is a cosmic and metaphysical statement before it is a religious one. Jesus is a personal and historical statement. Most Christians have the second, but without the first—which has made both Jesus and Christianity far too small.
What Holds Us Back from Genuine Spiritual Experience?
As we begin to explore our first point, Transcendence, this is the premise I am going to ask you to trust here:
An experience that impri
nts in your memory, or changes you at any depth, is not so much based in what you experienced (its content) as it is how—at what level of significance did you take it in?
Three people can be exposed to the same stimuli and come away with three different “experiences.” When you take in events, moments, relationships, and ideas in a readied and vulnerable way, allowing even the Beyond to show itself if it wants to, your likelihood of experiencing the Beyond substantially increases. Even quantum physics and biology now insist that the observer necessarily changes the content and results of an experiment. Our rational mind swears this isn’t true, but apparently it is, on a level we are not trained to see. Contemplation is training you to see the overlooked wholeness in all things.
Jesus states the same principle (in reverse!) when he ends one of his stories with this stunning retort to the rich man who wants Lazarus to return from the dead with warning for the living: Father Abraham says, “They will not be convinced even if someone should rise from the dead.”177 If you are not open to the Beyond of things, you will not allow yourself to experience a miraculous event happening right in front of you. People who do not believe in miracles never experience miracles. (Do not conclude, however, that people who shout “Miracle!” are always pointing to the Beyond; all too often they are largely pointing to themselves, which might also be okay.)
Let’s ground this insight, though, in what we said earlier: our explorations can’t be understood with the normal mind. Rather, they are best perceived with what we call the contemplative mind, which is an alternative operating system. “Deep calls unto deep,” as the psalmist says.178
Adrienne von Speyr, a twentieth century Swiss Catholic physician and theologian, has a beautiful way of expressing this:
The Father wants our faith itself to become trinitarian and alive through the manifestation of the Son and the sending forth of the Spirit. He does not want our faith in the Trinity of God to remain two-dimensional and theoretical, nor does he want us to see the one Person only when, and to the extent that, he presents himself, almost as if he were an object contemplated from a distance. Instead, we should be able to perceive each Person revealing himself in his unity with the others and, consequently, in their infinite, divine breadth. This unity...is the expression of love.179
Really, it’s only God in us that understands the things of God.180 We must take this very seriously and know how it operates in us, with us, for us, and as us. The failure to access our own operating system has kept much Christianity very immature and superficial, filled with secondhand clichés instead of any calm, clear, and immediate experience of reality. It has left us argumentative instead of appreciative.
Most things that we call experience are actually just additions or passing stimulation. To make matters worse, we imprison them inside of the experiences we already have; that’s why most people don’t grow very much. Most of us then default to one of a handful of templates and filters for all their experiences; everything gets pulled inside of what my little mind already agrees with. This cannot get you very far at all.
Tragically, our cultural default setting is for our inner life to mirror our biology, stopping most growth after age seventeen or eighteen, although I am told there is one more brain surge in the early twenties.
Thus, anything in the realm of mystery—which happens to be, of course, all mature religion, including the idea of the Trinity—remains static in the form of dogma or doctrine, highly abstract, densely metaphysical, and largely irrelevant. Certainly not life-changing unless we allow something to cross over, to be a brain-surger and paradigm-shifter. But I am told that on a very good day, most humans are at best willing to call 5 percent of their chosen opinions into question. I hope it is not true.
Do you ever wonder why Western atheism is on the rise? Why does the Christian West, by far, produce the highest number of atheists? What I believe, and have dedicated my life to reversing, is that we have not moved doctrine and dogma to the level of inner experience. As long as “received teaching” doesn’t become experiential knowledge, we’re going to continue creating a high quantity of disillusioned ex-believers. Or on the flip-side, we’ll manufacture very rigid believers who simply hold on to doctrines in very dry, dead ways with nothing going on inside.
And so we have two big groups on the landscape today: those who throw out the baby with the bathwater (many liberals and academics)—and those who seem to have drowned in the bathwater (many conservatives and fundamentalists).
How about allowing the bath water to keep flowing over you and through you?
It is anyway, but we can considerably help the process by gradually opening up the water faucets—both the cold and the hot.
Two Ways to Break Through
I might be oversimplifying, but I think there are basically two paths that allow people to have a genuinely new experience: the path of wonder and the path of suffering.
When you allow yourself to be led into awe and wonder, when you find yourself in an aha! moment and you savor it consciously (remember that joy and happiness take a minimum of fifteen conscious seconds to imprint on your neurons), then you can have a genuinely new experience; otherwise, you will fit everything back into your old paradigm, and it won’t really be an experience at all. It will at best be a passing diversion, a momentary distraction from your common “cruise control” of thoughts and feelings.
That’s all.
Awe and wonder are terms that are often correlative with mystery. All fundamentalist religion is terribly uncomfortable with mystery; it likes to take full control of the data, and mystery by definition leaves you out of control. Such moments of vulnerability are the very space where God can most easily break in with fresh experience; in fact, I doubt if God can break through in any other way. Again, in the spiritual world, you can never say with finality, “I know it,” or “I’ve got it all wrapped up.” As I wrote in part I, when you come to the end of this little volume, you’re certainly not going to be able to say that about the Blessed Trinity. All I’m going to hope to be able to do is circle around this mystery in such a way that invites you to dance, too.
The other path that programs us for genuinely new experience—although at great cost, and with the risk of closing down the soul—is suffering.
It must surely be worth the risk, since it comes into every life, necessarily, it seems, and with regularity—provided we don’t invest in too many insurance policies against it. Hence Jesus’ intentionally hyperbolic statements about “rich” people being incapable of understanding his message.
Suffering is the only thing strong enough to break down your control systems, explanatory mechanisms, logical paradigms, desire to be in charge, and carefully maintained sense of control. Both God and the guided soul know to trust suffering, it seems.
God normally has to lead you to the limits of your private resources. Some event, person, or moral situation must force you to admit, I cannot do this in my present state. This is our suffering.
Or your understanding of “what it all means” has to fail you in a very personal way: I can’t make sense of this. I can’t get through today.
This often happens when there has been a physical death, or the death of a marriage, a reputation, or an occupation. But you always feel both afraid and trapped. “How?” you cry out with ten levels of anguish and impossibility.
A good spiritual director might say quietly to themselves (not to the sufferer), Hallelujah! Now we’re going to begin the real spiritual journey.
Up to that point, it’s merely mental belief systems, mouthing off orthodoxies that mean very little, even to the person themselves. They’d never think of criticizing these feeble beliefs because they’re all they have, and some will hang on even more tightly because they don’t have any inner experience to ground their beliefs—which is often true of most overstatements and rigorously affirmed beliefs.
Just ask anybody whom you
sense truly knows—and you’ll find out what they know the most is that they don’t know anything! This is the giveaway that one has been down at least one of the two paths: wonder or suffering.
When religion returns to this kind of humility, I think we’ll see a great lessening of atheism in the West, and a great increase in happy religion.
The Explorer spacecraft, which we sent out in 1977, only in the mid-2000s began moving outside of our heliosphere—the realm of our sun—into massive, seemingly infinite space. Where will its end be? Is there a wall? Who built the wall? The spacecraft has been traveling a million miles a day for decades. It is now approaching the edge of our heliosphere, and yet it will be forty thousand years before it again approaches another galaxy.
Who is this God? What is this God up to? How can any of my words point to anything real or understandable to the human mind?
