by Richard Rohr
I love the way fourteenth-century Sufi mystic Hafiz put it: “I am a hole in a flute that the Christ’s breath moves through—listen to this music.”225
To be utterly given, and acting from this surrendered, creative center:
This is primal prayer.
This, to me, is holiness.
And the irony is, the very motivation for your continued search for God is gratitude for already having been given God. When you pray, it is not that you pray and sometimes God answers. When you pray, God has already answered. It would not have even entered your mind and heart to pray if the Wind had not just blown through you! Wow!
When much of early Christianity emerged, it was largely inside of a dominant Greek culture, and we basically overwrote Zeus onto the new description of God given us by Jesus. This Greek head god sat on his throne at the top of the pyramid, arbitrarily sending down thunderbolts. It was not a moral or consistent universe at all. It is no accident that the very word Zeus became Deus in Latin, or other variations of the same in other Latin- and Greek-based languages of the West.
The belief in God as Trinity had little chance of impacting ancient culture. Again, it is astounding that both John and Paul understood it so intuitively. Zeus/Deus was well ensconced in our minds. Soon, even Jesus was pictured sitting on a throne or emitting his own kind of thunderbolts; look at the Sistine Chapel.
Transcendence Deficit Disorder
Enlightened [ones] have found within themselves an essential contemplation which is above reason and without reason, and a fruitive tendency which pierces through every condition and all being, and through which they immerse themselves in a wayless abyss of fathomless beatitude, where the Trinity of the Divine Persons possess Their Nature in the essential Unity. Behold, this beatitude is so onefold and so wayless that in it every essential gazing, tendency, and creaturely distinction cease and pass away. For by this fruition, all uplifted spirits are melted and noughted in the Essence of God, Which is the superessence of all essence.226
How many of us can attest to having an experience even in the same universe as the beauty and majesty of God that this fourteenth-century Flemish mystic knew? We want to rush straight to the immanence of “melted and noughted,” but first we need to enter by the gate of the “wayless abyss.”
Or as the sometimes-prophetic Irish band U2 sings, “If you want to kiss the sky // Better learn how to kneel.”227
What we’ve very understandably tried to do in modern humanistic thinking and even in the liberalism of the past several decades is to pull God down and make God chummy—things like the satirical “Buddy Christ” makeover in the “Catholicism Wow!” campaign in filmmaker Kevin Smith’s iconoclastic film Dogma.
In reaction to the very real Zeus-like divine imagery that remains lodged in most conventional religion, we’ve tried to make God a little more palatable, retiring the idea of “the man upstairs” with the white beard and the endless stamina for smiting. But in rejecting the caricature, we’ve also denied a fuller portrait; rejecting God’s transcendence altogether denies the fountainhead of God’s very transformative power.
We actually end up taking away God’s heart-renovating and mind-boggling ability. We can’t really overcome the gap from our side; God has to do that from God’s side! God’s proactive actions are implicit in the dynamics of Trinity itself, and when that was incomprehensible to almost everybody, the Jesus event became God’s next attempt to bridge the gap.
When we “pull” God out of the heavens, we suffer from a real transcendence deficit. Our capacity for awe is diminished, and so are we. From here, our imaginations and heart-capacities atrophy; any need to worship God disappears in boredom and malaise. Gone is any felt experience of God who is beyond, holy, and transcendent.
For the life of me, I can’t see how either the smiter-with-the-mitre god or the cat-in-the-hat god can survive a serious encounter with even the visible universe! Look at the gorgeous photos coming from the Hubble telescope. As I mentioned earlier, it will take us forty thousand years before we get to the next star. Who is this God?
God must be utterly beyond in order to have any significance within! It’s a paradox. When God is only “inside us,” God becomes neutered of transforming power. I’ve sadly witnessed this in the cheap liberalism of the last forty years, an entire spiritual generation with no ability to kiss the ground, genuflect, or kneel; no capacity to bow, honor, or worship.
(And the same is true in too many conservative, seeker-friendly megachurches, not just the liberal mainline churches.)
“Oh yeah, I believe in God,” says the pop believer, but this God is so chummy that it’s not God anymore. God’s been pulled inside of my tiny psyche, with no new or wonderful place to take me!
God created us in God’s own image—and darn it, we’ve returned the favor.
Interfaith Friendship
As we’ve touched on earlier in our exploration of sat-chit-ananda, Trinitarian theology is going to offer us perhaps the best foundation for interfaith dialogue and friendship we’ve ever had, because now we don’t have Jesus as our only “trump card.” This makes intelligent dialogue with other religions easier, not harder. Up to now, we’ve generally used Jesus in a competitive way instead of a cosmic way, and thus others hear our belief at a tribal, “Come join us—or else” level. A far cry from the Universal Christ of Colossians “who reconciles all things to himself, in heaven and on earth.”228 In short, we made Jesus Christ into an exclusive savior instead of the totally inclusive savior he was meant to be. As my friend Brian McLaren likes to put it, “Jesus is the Way—he’s not standing in the way!”229
Once Christians learn to honor the Cosmic Christ as a larger ontological identity than the historical Jesus, then Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and spiritual-but-not-religious people have no reason to be afraid of us. They can easily recognize that our take on such an Incarnation includes and honors all of creation, and themselves too.
So what’s happening? It can almost be described in geometrical imagery. Maybe you sense the change happening in your soul already. Most people are raised with a monarchical, pyramidal view of reality; it starts with the parent-child relationship, but look at even the Great Seal of the United States, which is pictured on the back of every dollar bill you have ever spent. America is, of course, the rising pyramid, and when we accept God at the top of it—so the promise goes—we will be the novus ordo seclorum, or new world order. And annuit coeptis written above it asserts that God has “favored our undertakings” and made it all happen for us. How nice! (But is it God or Mammon that actually favors most of our undertakings?)
It is still a top-down world, and at least we are giving God the credit. But here is the crucial question: is this the credit that God wants or needs? Or is the plan much more subtle? Stay with this question! We must get back to the dance and move away from an exclusively “elevator theology.”
If we understand the Trinity as the basic template of reality, our minds will slowly transition from the concept of a pyramid to a circle, which utterly changes our consciousness about…
What’s really happening.
How it happens.
Where we’re going.
What the goal is.
And how it is that we’re a part of this eternal flow.
The important thing is the love affair.
The important thing is the dance itself.
Again, if God is Trinity, grace is intrinsic to all creatures. It’s not an occasional, later additive. Grace is built into the very nature of things; indeed, its very inner dynamic is moving all things toward growth. It is the air we breathe, and it’s our vocation to become who we are and all that we are. In classic theology, we call this “natural law”; everything is to live according to its true nature. But it takes awhile to know what this even is, if you have choice and will, as humans do. All plants and animals follow their natur
al law, although even there we find much diversity. As soon as you think it is always the female who bears the young, the seahorse appears!
So what is your true nature?
This will take you all your life to truly know, because just as God is mystery, you are the same kind of mystery to yourself. As Augustine put it in his Eucharistic liturgy for the newly baptized:
If you, therefore, are Christ’s body and members, it is your own mystery that is placed on the Lord’s table! It is your own mystery that you are receiving!230
Even though I’m beyond seventy now, new relationships still astound me: I’ll meet a new person, and if I can interface with them honestly, trust them, allow them, refuse to categorize or too quickly label them—it will invariably open up inside me new realms of my being that I didn’t know existed until I was in relationship with them.
The late John O’Donohue puts it so exquisitely:
The Christian concept of god as Trinity is the most sublime articulation of otherness and intimacy, an eternal interflow of friendship. This perspective discloses the beautiful fulfillment of our immortal longing in the words of Jesus, who said, Behold, I call you friends. Jesus, as the son of God, is the first Other in the universe; he is the prism of all difference. He is the secret anam cara of every individual. In friendship with him, we enter the tender beauty and affection of the Trinity. In the embrace of this eternal friendship, we dare to be free.231
That’s the power of relationship, and why we need to be in relationship to grow. Again, loners or separatists normally become strange and stagnant, as do people who use others instead of relating to them with reverence.
You are saying, in effect, I don’t need the Holy Spirit. I will find out who I am by myself, without participating in the dance. I will sit it out and just be a wallflower.
I want to repeat, in case you’ve already forgotten, that there are only two things strong enough to keep you inside the dance of life:
Great love and great suffering.
These open you to your deepest, truest nature. They keep you in the circle instead of climbing pyramids.
Do We Have to Talk About Sin?
Against this backdrop, sin is elegantly simple to understand: sin is whatever stops the flow. Call it hatred, call it unforgiveness, call it negativity, call it violence, call it victimhood—all the things Jesus warns us against in the Sermon on the Mount.232 You just can’t afford to do these things. They are death, always death, although God will even use these deaths in your favor, if you will allow it, leading to “negative capability.”
Like a slingshot or drawn bowstring that actually creates forward momentum, negative capability describes those failures, that emptiness, those acts of resistance that end up being the very force and motivation that catapults us ahead. This is perhaps summed up in Paul’s paradoxical observation that “the Law was given to multiply the opportunities for failing, so that where sin abounds, grace abounds even more.”233 What an amazing and courageous insight, and so totally counterintuitive! God’s mercy is so infinite and resourceful that God uses even our sin for our own redemption.
In fact, is there any other pattern?
Sin is not some arbitrary list of little bad things that God tests you on; so few appear to pass this giant Entrance Exam anyway. It creates a rather dismal, depressed world. Sin is not a word for certain things that upset or hurt God. Inside the Perfect Flow, God could only be “hurt” if we are hurting ourselves, just as, in effect, the risen Jesus tenderly says to Paul, “It is hard for you when you push back against the goad.”234
God is essentially saying, “It is you who cannot afford to be unloving; you just can’t. It’s going to stop the intrinsic flow, and you’ll be outside the mystery; you’ll be outside the flow of grace that is inherent to every event—yes, even sin.” We are not punished for our sins—we are punished by our sins!
This is why Jesus commanded us to love. You must love. You must, or you won’t know the basics. You won’t know God, you won’t know yourself, and you won’t know the divine dance. And some kind of suffering is always the price and proof of love.
We all know this is many times more work than obeying the Ten Commandments. I hope you obey the Ten Commandments—I’m all for it. But it’s ten times more important to live moment by moment in communion, staying in the positive flow and noting all negative resistance. This is your contemplative practice, which we originally just called prayer.
Flowing people heal just by being there.
Sinful people, according to how we have here described sin, tear down just by being there.
So from this more spacious place, let’s again acknowledge:
God for us, we call you Father.
God alongside us, we call you Jesus.
God within us, we call you Holy Spirit.
You are the eternal mystery that enables, enfolds, and enlivens all things,
Even us and even me.
Every name falls short of your goodness and greatness.
We can only see who you are in what is.
We ask for such perfect seeing—
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.
Amen.
Entering by Another Door
Let me say again: God is not only stranger than we think, but stranger than the mind can think. Perhaps much of the weakness of our first two thousand years of reflection upon the Trinity—and many of our dogmas, for that matter—is that we’ve tried to enter this space through the door of our logical mind instead of through the door of prayer.
Did you know that the early meaning of “theologian” among the Desert Fathers and Mothers was simply someone who truly prayed, not a brilliant mental gymnast? A theologian was one who understood these inner movements, subtle energies, and interconnections. In fact, a theologian was not trusted unless he or she was, first of all, a man or woman of prayer.
Frankly, the head does dangerous and stupid things when it hijacks our nervous system. To operate out of a head disconnected from gut and heart is to court disconnection—even disaster.
But it’s instinctual to our species to be connected. I think creation is endowed with a natural order accessible to us precisely because we, the observers of creation, are essentially made in the same image as the observed.
There’s a principle of likeness between the observer and the observed.
All cognition is re-cognition.
You see it because it’s already you.
You know it over there because you already know it in here, at the deepest level of your being. The best feedback I get from readers is, “Richard, you didn’t teach me anything totally new; the words are different, but somehow in my deepest intuition I already knew what you’re saying.”
All a good spiritual teacher can do is give words and verbalization so that you find yourself saying, “Yes, I already know this. He may be drawing it out for me, but this insight is not coming from Richard.”
If I’m not sparking recognition in you, I don’t think I’m teaching in the Spirit. Because it’s only the Spirit in me that knows what the Spirit in you knows, and we’re both trying to hone back to that same center.
The Trinity—and its generative effect, love—is the true “theory of everything.” Everybody is searching for this unifying theory lately. Triune love, it seems to me, is the resolution piece that helps us to understand, to let go, and to stand secure in the world, in the same relational way that we find God in Godself standing.
Only love, the mystics say, can finally know accurately. Now please don’t interpret this “love” in a sentimental way, all right? This isn’t saccharine, or a Hallmark special.
When the self is surrendered—when we’re not too tied to our own agenda, anger, fear, or desire to make things happen our way—we are truly open to love. But be aware of the heart’s propensity to clench and close.<
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The very act of reading books like this carries with it a certain danger. Readers approach a book with certain clear expectations. Maybe the back cover didn’t say it was going to meet those expectations, but they lay implicitly in people’s minds. When the content fails to conform to expectations, some readers actually feel they have a right to take offense! Do you see the narcissism in that? It doesn’t show up just in reading, but also in life: I want reality to be what I want it to be.
If this is you, you’re going to go through life unhappy 90 percent of the time, because the world is not going to meet your preset expectations. Every set expectation is a resentment waiting to happen.
Being There
As you hold this book in your hands, see if you can fully sink into right now—always remembering:
You can’t get here; there is no place to get to.
You can only be here.
Sisters and brothers, I believe that behind every mistaken understanding of reality, there is always a mistaken understanding of God. That might sound like too broad of a generalization, but I find it to be true. Most people don’t bother to think at this theological level, nor do they need to, but if you draw close to someone who is in a violent, unhappy, or fearful state of being, you always find that their operative god (and there always is one, whether they know it or not) is inadequate, distorted, or even toxic. Everybody has their primary loyalty and reference point, even if it is merely the god of safety.
So everybody has a god, or one central reference point, whether they admit it or not. All you need is a god who is really worthy of being God. Because you will become the god you worship. Truly good people have always met a truly good God.
An Amazing Chain of Being
It always surprises people that there are very few sayings or stories found uniformly in all four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; there really aren’t that many.
This is one:
Anyone who welcomes you welcomes me; and anyone who welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.235
