The Divine Dance

by Richard Rohr

  Contemporary teacher Frank Viola puts this another way:

  Within the triune God we discover mutual love, mutual fellowship, mutual dependence, mutual honor, mutual submission, mutual dwelling, and authentic community. In the Godhead there exists an eternal, complementary, and reciprocal interchange of divine life, divine love, and divine fellowship.…

  The church is an organic extension of the triune God....

  …When a group of Christians follows their spiritual DNA, they will gather in a way that matches the DNA of the triune God—for they possess [this] same life that God Himself possesses....

  …The headwaters of the church are found in the Godhead.242

  The mystery of community in the Trinity is the mystery of allowing recognition, and inter-action.

  Think about that for about ten years!

  The Incarnation Is the Gospel

  Jesus became incarnate to reveal the image of the invisible God.243 The personal Incarnation is the logical conclusion of God’s love affair with creation. Do you know why I can say this? Do you know why I can believe this? Because I see it in human beings: over a period of time, we all become what we love. God in Jesus became what God loves—everything human.

  Jesus dramatically exemplified the oft-quoted line of the Latin poet Terence: “I am a human being, and nothing human is foreign to me.”

  And I love how Eugene Peterson puts this idea in his Message translation:

  The Word became flesh and blood,

  and moved into the neighborhood.

  We saw the glory with our own eyes,

  the one-of-a-kind glory,

  like Father, like Son,

  Generous inside and out,

  true from start to finish.244

  Just show me what you love, and I’ll show you what you’re going to be like five years from now. Show me what you give time to, what your treasure is, what you give energy to—and I’ll show you what you’ll become.

  God had to become human once the love affair began, because—strictly speaking—love implies some level of likeness or even equality. The Incarnation was an inevitable conclusion, not an accident or an anomaly. It shouldn’t have been a complete surprise to us.

  God was destined and determined, I believe, to become a human being, but it’s still a big deal when the impossible gap is overcome from God’s side and by God’s choice, even if it was from the beginning. To situate it in one person in one era is the supreme example of what Walter Brueggemann calls the “scandal of particularity,”245 which is clearly the biblical pattern. In other words, it is always a bit disappointing when YHWH seems to be teaching merely through one-time anecdotes, one people Israel, or one historical Jesus, instead of revealing universal patterns through these one-time anecdotal stories or characters. A mystic is precisely one who sees things in wholes and not just in parts; he moves the incarnate moment to read the very mind of God. Literalists get lost in the specific and find it hard to make the jump. Basically, when we talk about God, we are talking about everything. Yet when God talks to us about this “everything,” he does not talk in abstractions or philosophy but through very specific stories and characters. Big truth must be presented on small stages for humans to get the point.

  Maybe that’s why we decorate everything in sight on December 25. This almost certainly isn’t Jesus’ actual birthday, but it doesn’t make a bit of difference what the day is—we must deck the halls! Every table, every tree, every window, saturated with colors and light…as if to reveal its inner, hidden identity.

  For a few weeks, everything must shine.

  My father Francis was big into fasting, but on Christmas Day, he said, “Even the walls should eat meat!” Francis found his footing in the ecstasy of both the universal Incarnation and the scandal of the particular Incarnation; once you truly get this mystery of Incarnation, redemption is a foregone conclusion. For the Franciscans, Christmas was already Easter.246

  You see, Incarnation, rightly appreciated, is already redemption—Jesus doesn’t need to die on the cross to convince us that God loves us, although I surely admit that the dramatic imagery has convinced and convicted many a believer. The cross corrected our serious nearsightedness in relation to the Father, buying the human soul a good pair of glasses to clearly see the Father’s love.

  The Mystery of Incarnation is already revealing God’s total embrace. The baby in the crib already proclaims, I like you; I want to be one with you. But you know what? It wasn’t enough for our psyche. The cross did not change the mind of the Father. Father was totally given from all eternity. The cross was needed as a dramatic, earth-shaking icon to change your mind about God, and it still serves that purpose. I think that even movies like The Passion of the Christ serve the purpose to shake up the psyche, to understand there could be an immense givenness in creation itself.

  If you believe that the Son’s task is merely to solve some cosmic problem the Father has with humanity, that the Son’s job is to do that, then once the problem is solved, there’s apparently no need for the concrete imitation of Jesus or his history-changing teachings. Yes, we continue to thank him for solving this problem, but we’ve lost the basis for an ongoing communion, a constant love affair, not to mention the wariness we now have about the Father and the lack of an active need for a dynamic Holy Spirit.

  The idea of God as Trinity largely fell apart once we pulled Jesus out of the One Flow and projected our problem onto God. We needed convincing, not God.

  Bleeding and Forbearing

  When I was in India some years back, I had a profound extended meeting with a holy man. He told me many wonderful things.

  This is something that stayed with me: he said a great being has two hearts—one that bleeds and one that forbears. This struck me deeply.

  In the heart that bleeds, I understood that whatever you enter into union with, you will suffer with. When you choose to love, you will eventually suffer, if only at the loss of the beloved. It is as certain as the dawn. Because when you give yourself completely, the given-ness is not always—or even usually—perfectly received. It is resisted, resented, given back to you, or not even noticed.

  But what is this other heart that forbears? Forbears is not a word that we use a lot. Indians, in my experience, sometimes use English words more precisely than Americans do, and it’s a gift. Here is what he told me he meant by forbear: A great being stays with what she loves; she’s patient, she forgives, and she allows what she loves to develop, to grow. She overlooks its mistakes, and in this sense she suffers for and with reality. This is the deepest meaning of passion; patior is the Latin verb meaning to suffer or to undergo reality (as opposed to controlling it).

  When the holy man said that to me, I realized that he was describing Jesus: a fully great being who holds together all the contraries that we cannot hold.

  Jesus forbears our brokenness so that we can do the same—for ourselves and, finally, for one another. He knows, as only the mind of God can, that what we refer to as evil is really goodness tortured by its own hunger and thirst, goodness that has not been able to experience being received and given back. “Evil” is what happens when human beings become tortured with this desire for goodness that they cannot experience. And then we do the kind of horrible things we see on our televisions and social media streams: killing each other, humiliating each other, hurting each other in abuses of power and privilege, showing a complete inability to even recognize the imago Dei in other beings or in ourselves.

  True seeing extends your sight even further: the people you want to hate, the people who carry out the worst atrocities, are not evil at their core—they’re simply tortured human beings. They still carry the divine image. Hitler and Stalin carried the divine image. Hussein and Bin Laden carried the divine image! I am not inclined to admit this, but it’s the only conclusion that full seeing leads me toward. The forbearance of God toward
me allows me to see the divine dance in all other broken vessels.

  If I’m honest, I have to acknowledge that seeing in this way robs me of a certain privilege I’ve allowed myself my whole life: I have always eaten generously from the “Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.” The categories are clear in my mind, which makes judging come naturally. Kindness and forbearance? Much less so.

  As I’ve entered this dance more and more, God has taken away from me the power to choose who are the good folks and who are bad ones; I no longer have the freedom to choose who I show respect to, which races I feel more comfortable around, and what religions—or religious subgroups—I don’t like.

  “Those secular liberals!”

  “Those fundamentalists!”

  “Those Republican [or Democrat] idiots!”

  But I’ve been dining my way through an alternative. Invited to a conscientious dietary shift, I eat instead from the Tree of Life, offered from the center of the archetypal Garden for all who enter the flow with bleeding and forbearing hearts. What a difference it makes: in this glorious, undifferentiated, freely-offered life, there is no longer a “they,” there.

  It’s all “we.”

  Now we stand defenseless before such a Generous Outpouring, utterly vulnerable before such Infinite Mercy. The giving side from God is constant; all is given all the time! This Divine generosity only waits for a Mary-like womb, a beloved Son. Any bit of batter willing to receive the yeast; any bit of matter willing to receive the Feast. Any piece of dirt or stardust waiting and willing to be anointed as “the Christ.”

  Jesus is the one who never doubted this anointing, but we are all messiahs in the making as we gradually learn to receive our own anointing (Christ = the anointed one or signed one = Messiah). As a little Catholic boy, I was always told that we were all “other Christs.”247

  It is a kind of cosmic sympathy with all things, and such cosmic sympathy is the hope of the world. Any “Christ” sees Christ everywhere else; in fact, that is exactly what it means to be an anointed one.

  Christ bore the mystery fully ahead of time, at the head of the Great Parade or “triumphal procession,” as Paul calls it, so that Christ could be the first of many brothers and sisters.248 Now we can handle it in little doses with him, in him, and through him. As I wrote earlier, these became the three great prepositions that we use to conclude the great Eucharistic Prayer:

  through Christ

  with Christ

  in Christ

  The small, isolated, or private self holds a truth this big—preparing us, in fact, to live as Christ.

  If you’re still operating out of any kind of individualistic or small-minded spirituality, you’re not going to get this. It can be experienced only through mutual presence, full-bodied attentiveness, where you can assess the flow toward you, within you, through you, and outward from what you think of as your self.

  The Great Attractor

  Coventry Patmore, the nineteenth-century English poet, wrote:

  This “dry doctrine” of the Trinity, or primary Act of Love, is the keynote of all living knowledge and delight. God himself becomes a concrete object and an intelligible joy when contemplated as the eternal felicity of a Lover with the Beloved, the Anti-type and very original of the Love which inspires the Poet and the thrush.249

  You are the desiring of God. God desires all things in and through you.

  And if you’re feeling any desire for God growing as you read these pages, this is the Son’s desire for fellowship with the Father acting itself out in and through you. This is the Holy Spirit, who is the personification of the eternal and abundant energy, life, and love between the other Two. Listen to this desiring, and wait for its deeper—its deepest—level. It will get you there, as the Holy Spirit always does.

  You see, you by yourself:

  You don’t know how to desire God.

  You don’t know where to look.

  You don’t know what to look for.

  You don’t know what God’s name is.

  You don’t know God’s shape.

  You originally don’t know God’s energy.

  You will almost always look in the wrong places.

  Just beautiful sunsets and not cracks in the sidewalk.

  Just weddings and funerals and not the laundry room.

  Look at our history. I mean, every tenth street corner, billboard, and television network is shouting “God!” and yet they still seem to be pretty hateful and pretty unhappy! It gives us the impression that the flow isn’t necessarily happening.

  Let me say this as strongly as I can: Only God in you knows God. You can just jump on board if you so desire. That’s Trinitarian spirituality.

  You and your little mind and your little self can know about God; you can study catechisms, all kinds of Bible verses, and systematic theologies; and you can feel real informed theologically, either on the progressive side or on the conservative side. You can walk around with a title like “Doctor of Divinity” (Catholic bishops acquire this ipso facto at their ordination!) or “Professor of Theology” at a famous Christian university, and still not know or love God, yourself, or your neighbor.

  “To know the Lord and his ways,” as the Jewish prophets put it,250 has very little to do with intelligence and very much to do with a wonderful mixture of confidence and surrender. People who live in this way tend to be the calmest and happiest people I know. They draw their life from the inside out.

  Did you know that?

  I offer it to you, free for the taking.

  You can be an uneducated woman cleaning hotel rooms and live in this quiet and uplifting light. I have met them often—they make eye contact, stand their ground, and smile in a genuine way.

  It all comes to this: do you allow the free-flow or do you stop it by endless forms of resistance, judgment, negativity, and fear?

  Just “ask, seek, and knock” as Jesus says, “and the door will be opened to you.”251 Why would God offer you something you have never asked for? Or really want?

  Honestly, most unhappy people I have worked with have never once asked “to know the Lord and his ways.”252 For them, prayer was just a desperate, momentary attempt to manipulate a Higher Power, forming what Martin Buber would call the “I-It relationship” where neither party maintains its dignity.

  God cannot allow us to relate to him as if God were an “it”; nor do we let our God out of the box we created for her. We both lose our dignity.

  God is completely unavailable for any manipulation or cajoling, but God is always and immediately available to the sincere seeker of love and union. God waits until you are capable of an I-Thou relationship, or edges you in that direction—just like your first failed attempt at romance once did. Only then do we have adult reciprocal relationship where both grow and become.

  Then we both win, and neither party is diminished—just like the Trinity. God is a fussy Lover; God does not play hard to get, but God holds out for true partners. True love always enhances both sides, and if we’re to believe many of the prophets and mystics, apparently we actually matter to God; some even said we “change” God!253 Wow! Hold on to that for now.

  * * *

  176. Colossians 3:11.

  177. Luke 16:31.

  178. Psalm 42:7 (nkjv).

  179. Adrienne von Speyr, The Boundless God, trans. Helena M. Tomko (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011), Kindle e-book (locations 469–473), in chapter 5, “The Holy Spirit and How He Paves the Way to the Father.”

  180. See, for example, 1 Corinthians 2:11–16.

  181. See Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “Sketch of a Personal Universe,” trans. J. M. Cohen, in Human Energy (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1962), 72, https://cac.org/the-shape-of-the-universe-is-love-2016-02-29/.

  182. Again, we should p
robably end this book right here! What else is there to say?

  183. See Philippians 2:7.

  184. James Emery White, The Rise of the Nones: Understanding and Reaching the Religiously Unaffiliated (Baker, 2014), 21.

  185. See http://www.pewforum.org/2012/10/09/nones-on-the-rise-religion/.

  186. See Rohr, Eager to Love, chapter 7, “The Franciscan Genius: The Integration of the Negative.”

  187. 2 Corinthians 1:3–5 (niv).

  188. Colossians 1:24 (niv).

  189. Anne Hunt, The Trinity: Insights from the Mystics (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2010), 136.

  190. For more on this remarkable woman, see Etty Hillesum: Essential Writings, Modern Spiritual Masters (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2009).

  191. See Hebrews 12:2 (nkjv, kjv), and of course The Neverending Story by Michael Ende (New York: Puffin Books, 1979).

  192. See Romans 8:28.

  193. Miguel H. Díaz, “The Life-giving Reality of God from Black, Latin American, and US Hispanic Theological Perspectives,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Trinity, ed. Peter C. Phan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 263. Diaz draws from Karen Baker-Fletcher’s excellent Dancing with God: The Trinity from a Womanist Perspective (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2006).

  194. James H. Cone, “God Is Black,” in Lift Every Voice: Constructing Christian Theologies from the Underside, ed. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite and Mary Potter Engel, rev. ed., 101–114 (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001), 103.

  195. See Ezekiel 16:63.