The Divine Dance

by Richard Rohr

  Again, those who are looking through microscopes and those who are looking through telescopes are seeing this same pattern: if reality is anything, it’s absolutely relational. It’s orbital somehow, mostly empty space, and even much of that is dark matter or black holes—none of it fully subject to our control. Then mystics like Teilhard de Chardin come along and teach that “the [very] physical structure of the universe is love.”181 All this orbiting, exploding, expanding, and even contracting is Infinite Love at work.182

  Everything you have ever seen with your eyes is the self-emptying of God into multitudinous physical and visible forms.

  In other words, Infinity is forever limiting itself into finite expressions, and this could even be called the “suffering” of God. The Christ learned this self-emptying, or kenosis,183 from his eternal life in the Trinity. It is not just Jesus who suffers, but the cross is the visible symbol of what is always going on inside of God!

  Think on this. It should be enough to make anyone love the Christian message.

  No one would want to opt out of such love, would they?

  Yet many of our young people, and many of our old people, too, are not having it. They’re leaving the right-belief systems of their parents and grandparents in droves. This is a mass exodus from institutional faith that demographers are calling “the rise of the Nones.” Nones comprise about 20 percent of all Americans, and one-third of Americans under thirty.184 A Pew Research Center study says that “while 42% of the [religiously] unaffiliated describe themselves as neither a religious nor a spiritual person, 18% say they are a religious person, and 37% say they are spiritual but not religious.”185

  Having little patience with (or appreciation for) mystery, as well as so little humility or basic love for groups other than our own (never mind nonhuman creation), maybe our Christian religion in its present formulation has to die for a truly cosmic and love-centered spiritual path to be born. I sincerely wonder if this might be true.

  Suffering’s Surprising Sustenance

  We’re spending this entire book exploring the path of love and wonder; let’s take just one more section to fully dive into suffering, shall we? I know it isn’t likely your favorite topic—unless you’re a masochist!—but I think an understanding of suffering love can be quite valuable to you as you reflect on your own pain. I make no promises, but you just might discover meaning—and redemption—in what you’ve gone through.

  Trinitarian spirituality leads us to an open-handed embrace of the whole—no exceptions. This is the circle of freedom, certainly, but it’s also a circle of suffering. The negative side dare not be eliminated.186 Everything belongs.

  As a first-century letter to friends of God puts it:

  Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from the Spirit. For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ.187

  Can you see the entirety of the Trinitarian worldview at work here? This letter was penned about the year 58 CE. The theology of Trinity hadn’t yet been developed; it took three centuries for us to do this. But here Paul, a first-rate mystic, already intuits the whole thing. He is already addressing all three of the persons of the Trinity as magnetic Sources that are drawing and naming his experience.

  In the Pauline school, the letter to the Colossians further speaks of our power to contribute back to this circle of eternal consolation and eternal suffering:

  Now I rejoice in what I am suffering for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church.188

  What’s he talking about? Clearly, he’s involved in a participatory mystery that’s drawing him in. Formerly, when I read lives of the mystics, I thought they were always praying to feel some of Jesus’ suffering. They’re always depicted holding, or looking at, a crucifix. I frankly thought most of them were sadomasochists!

  But I was wrong; I misunderstood these mystics. They can only be understood by someone who is in the dance. Let me give you two examples.

  The first is Teresa of Ávila, the sixteenth-century Spanish Carmelite teacher who was named a Doctor of the Church by Pope Paul VI in 1970 due to her keen insight and spirit for reform. She said this:

  My soul began to enkindle, and it seemed to me I knew clearly in an intellectual vision that the entire Blessed Trinity was present...all three Persons were represented distinctly in my soul and that they spoke to me, telling me that from this day I would see an improvement in myself in respect to three things and that each one of these Persons would grant me a favor: one, the favor of charity; another, the favor of being able to suffer gladly; and the third, the favor of experiencing this charity with an enkindling in the soul....It seems those three Persons, being only one God, were so fixed within my soul that I saw that were such divine company to continue it would be impossible not to be recollected.189

  This communion, participation, and solidarity with the mystery becomes so deep that a second exemplar, Etty Hillesum, wrote to this effect while she was at Westerbork transit camp, before her ultimately fatal captivity in Auschwitz: I somehow want to suffer with you, God. All this suffering is somehow your suffering, and I want to participate with you in it.190

  We all find ourselves falling tragically short of abundant life, in spite of all our comfort-seeking. We find, much to our disappointment, that there’s nothing in it. We all eventually discover that our hearts and souls will not be fed at the trough of self-seeking.

  God is not “once upon a time”—God is “the never-ending story” in which we are scripted!191

  This is scary-good news, from which we can consciously draw freedom and meaning. It seems we can actually cooperate with God, creating spaces of freedom in the heart of the world. Paul even spoke of it as “working together with,” or co-creation.192 When she was at Westerbork in the midst of tremendous suffering, Etty Hillesum lived an astonishing existence of peace, love, and communion with God. She created little spaces of freedom for herself and for others. She found the deepest meaning of life.

  This is full reality, so full it can include the downside. Etty Hillesum was completely operating in God, and even as God, in her suffering. She was full-blown in the cycle of the mystery, drawn into a life larger than her own. She might not even have understood why she would think or say such an illogical thing as I somehow want to suffer with you, God. It’s not that we masochistically seek pain or suffering, but when we encounter suffering, we find our capacity growing if we stay connected to the flow. Obviously, even then we have to block out a certain degree of raw suffering for self-care. We can’t take it all in, but apparently God can. That’s the visual of the cross—God taking in all the pain of history. You don’t have to take it all in, but don’t block it entirely. Let pain bring its gift of vulnerability. Let some of it change you. Let some of it call you outside your comfort zone to this bigger place where we all are one. In a way, there is only one suffering and one cosmic sadness, and it is the very suffering of God. And we all share in it.

  Such an empathetic plunge into solidarity with God and humanity can never proceed from mere theological theory; it has been seen by many saints as a vocation, an invitation, and even a privilege.

  I find this solidarity even more impressive when heard through the voices of those who didn’t at first take it up as a vocation and certainly not from a place of privilege, those who instead found themselves in social situations where the dominant culture left them disempowered—even oppressed. Listen to this articulation of the Divine Dance from the “underside”:

  As beloved triune community, God “dances” to birth human communities torn by suffering, hatred, and division. God empathizes with the oppressed in “blues-filled” expe
riences and directs their anger creatively and constructively for the sake of justice. In particular, the Spirit who hovered in creation from the beginning of the world is the creative and “life-inspiring relation of God” that makes “a way out of no way possible.” “She” is the relational action of God sent “to create beauty out of ugliness, celebrate life in the midst of suffering, and walk in love in the midst of hate.” As the life-giving relation, the Spirit prophetically seeks to realize human societies in the image of God.193

  Trinity is the all-in-all God and is thus everywhere without exception; if God could be said to have a favorite place, however, it is always in solidarity with the “other”—those on the margins of power. Black Liberation theologian James Cone puts it provocatively:

  God is black...God is mother...God is rice...God is red.

  The blackness of God implies that essence of the nature of God is to be found in the concept of liberation. Taking seriously the Trinitarian view of the Godhead, black theology says that as Creator, God identified with oppressed Israel, participating in the bringing into being of this people; as Redeemer, God became the Oppressed One in order that all may be free from oppression; as Holy Spirit, God continues the work of liberation. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the Creator and the Redeemer at work in the forces of liberation in our society today.194

  Do we—especially those of us located in a more privileged place—dare accept this? If we are Trinitarian, I say we must; God’s humility calls for it. What absolute freedom to join the Beloved wherever he is—especially in beloved community, living out the good struggle for increased dignity, harmony, creativity, and liberation. We know that, during his entire life on earth, Jesus went wherever the pain was; his apprentices only follow him.

  At-One-Ment

  Sometimes I court controversy because we Franciscans never explained God’s at-one-ment with humanity in terms of the current popular atonement theory that some theologians call “penal substitution.” We never did, since the thirteenth-century debates on the same.

  Please understand that I’m not questioning God’s redemptive work in and through Jesus Christ; I’m only questioning a particular interpretation of it that was virtually unheard of in our ancient past but seems to pick up steam over the millennia.

  I think penal substitution is a very risky theory, primarily because of what it implies about the Father’s lack of freedom to love or to forgive his own creation.

  It is already an uphill climb to get people to trust the infinite love of God, and this does not help at all. I know this from years of directing souls. Any “transactional” explanation of salvation keeps people from the oh-so-necessary transformation into trust and love that we all desperately need. Humans change in the process of love-mirroring, and not by paying any price or debt. This lifeless, transactional approach is a direct and unfortunate corollary to pulling Jesus out of the fountain fullness of the Holy Trinity!

  The cross is the standing icon and image of God, showing us that God knows what it’s like to be rejected; God is in solidarity with us in the experience of abandonment; God is not watching the suffering from a safe distance. Somehow, believe it or not, God is in the suffering with us.

  God is not only stranger than we thought, but stranger than we’re capable of thinking! But we tried to pull salvation into some kind of quid pro quo logic and justice theory—and retributive justice at that! God’s justice, revealed in the prophets, is always restorative justice, but this takes a transformed consciousness to understand. Read, for example, Ezekiel 16:53–55 where, after reaming out the people of Israel, Ezekiel uses the word “restore” four times in a row, and then “restored” three more times. God “punishes” Israel by loving them even more and at even deeper levels, just as God does with every human soul. This is the biblical theme of restorative justice, but it was just too countercultural to be heard above the nonstop historical drumbeat of retributive justice.

  The quid pro quo, retributive mind has to break down in order to truly move forward with God. This is the unique job description of grace and undeserved mercy. Mystics are people who allow this new calculus, but it is always an act of surrender and falling. Ezekiel says that Israel will feel “ashamed,” “confused,” and “reduced to silence” when God forgives them for everything they have done.195 Grace and mercy are always a humiliation to the ego. We must accept God’s knowing and loving as the full and final shape of goodness. But you must know that, to the ego, this first feels like losing; and to the “counting” mind, it feels like undeserved mercy. Basically, we have to stop counting, measuring, and weighing.

  Let me paraphrase 1 John 4:10 in this way: love consists in this—not limiting God by our human equations of love, but allowing God’s infinite love to utterly redefine our own.

  Whenever we love, we are in some way participating in the very suffering of God, the necessary self-emptying that must precede and make room for every infilling. Yes, we must offer our lives opposing human and planetary suffering, I hope. But paradoxically, we embrace suffering as one vital form of participating in the mystery of the Incarnate One and the healing of the world.

  We want to take away suffering whenever we can, and we want to lessen human pain whenever possible. We certainly don’t want to impose it, although we all know that we do increase the suffering in the world through our sin and mutual alienation. But somehow, after we’ve done all we can to try to alleviate suffering according to our gifts and callings, we find that we’re led to embracing what is, embracing what is left—and this is often suffering and pain, is it not?

  Maybe this is the great death, this third space where I refuse to waste the rest of my years in either fight or flight. Where I give up the search for someone to hate or to blame—myself or anybody else. I’m going to somehow enter into solidarity with this pain. I’ll not allow myself to participate in other people’s abandonment, betrayal, rejection, or marginalization.

  That’s why the saints, the Trinitarian believers, always find ourselves going to the edge, going to the bottom, going to those who are excluded at the margins. Jesus is constantly going to the lepers and those whom society labels “sinners.” How could he have made it any clearer than he did? Once we see this, it becomes much harder for us to fall into that ancient, ubiquitous fear that God causes suffering, which has always been an intellectual stumbling block.

  On a cross, we find this man who has given his whole life to heal suffering becoming a victim of suffering himself. Instead of being a torturer, a murderer, a tyrant, or an oppressor, Jesus shares in the victimization of humanity; and it’s here that even Jesus experiences his own resurrection. He neither plays the victim nor creates victims. This lays the third path of redemptive suffering before history and eternity.

  Jesus himself dies and is reborn in this transformative place. The word that most describes this total dynamic of being given to and giving back with total vulnerability on each side is, ironically, the word forgiveness.

  No wonder two-thirds of Jesus’ teaching is directly or indirectly about forgiveness!

  To forgive, you have to be able to see the other person—at least momentarily—as a whole person, as an image of the Divine, containing holiness and horror at the same time. In other words, you can’t eliminate the negative. You know they’ve hurt you. You know they did something wrong.

  You have to learn to live well with paradox, or you can’t forgive. The trouble with so much conventional religion is this cultural attitude of, “Well, I’ll forgive when they’ve earned it, when they’ve proven themselves.”

  That’s not forgiveness—that’s a deal!

  God loves you precisely in your obstinate unworthiness, when you’re still a mixture of good and bad, when you’re gloriously in flux. You’re not a perfectly loving person, and God still totally loves you.

  When you can participate in that mystery of being loved, even as the mixed bag that you are, you c
an receive the gift of the forgiveness. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s the only magnetic center that knows how to forgive other people—especially when people have really screwed you, really betrayed you, really abandoned you, really humiliated you. And sooner or later, this happens to all of us.

  This is why the Franciscans have rejected the whole “forensic” notion of atonement—it not only does violence to the character of God, but it’s also overly sanitized against messy reality, it’s an abstraction against immediacy. The whole shattering experience of living is avoided whenever we try to make forgiveness into mere legal pardon—like Catholic indulgences or confession, or Protestant transactional theories of salvation. Such an approach reflects a mind-set of, “Let’s do something. Let’s avoid this whole relational vulnerability thing if we can, okay? Let’s just skip out on confidence and surrender.”

  This kind of religion is not Trinitarian. It’s not participating in the divine dance, and it’s not going to get us anywhere. When I can stand under the waterfall of infinite mercy and know that I am loved precisely in my unworthiness, then I can easily pass along mercy to you.

  Check each day how you’re doing with forgiveness, all right? That’s as good a test as any I can think of to see if you’re living inside the incalculable mystery of divine generosity.

  Do you know what’s even harder to forgive? It’s often the petty things, the accumulating resentments. The little things you know about another person; how they sort of did you wrong yesterday. No big deal, but the ego loves to grab onto those; they build up on the psyche like a repetitive stress injury. I think that in many ways, it’s much harder to let go of these micro-offenses, precisely because they’re so tiny. And so we unconsciously hoard them, and they clog us up.

  But God is not transactional, and God is not needy. You can trust that God is treating you as you would wish to be treated—letting go of your pettiness, your silliness, your judgmentalism, and your blockages to love—while still seeing you as whole.196