The Divine Dance

by Richard Rohr

  Everything is holy now.273 And the only resistance to that divine flow of holiness and wholeness is human refusal to see, to enjoy, and to participate.

  What it comes down to is that we are each a transmitter station, a relay station. That’s what we are, that’s what we wonderfully are, and sadly this is somehow humiliating for the ego. I was so happy when I first preached in Germany and found out that my last name, Rohr, was translated as “conduit” or “pipe.” Alleluia!

  But my ego self is not satisfied to be a pass-through account; I want to be “Richard Rohr!” Yet this small, egoic frame of reference is going to be gone in a few years in the form that I presently identify with. All I can be is a part of the circle of praise; just knowing that I’m part of the team becomes more than enough, especially when I recognize that it was all given to me freely.

  I didn’t ask to be born. I thank God I was born, and I’m grateful to be here. My sister, St. Clare of Assisi, is reported to have said, as she lay dying, “Thank you for allowing me to be a human being.”

  There it is.

  Thank God that I got my little chance to dance on this stage of life, to reflect the glory of God back to God.

  Once I was able to move from pyramid thinking to circular thinking, by reason of the Trinity—ah! Then my mind let go of its own defenses and stopped refusing the universal dance.

  T. S. Eliot described another English poet, William Blake, as a person who also lived in this dance. Eliot says of Blake:

  He understood. He was naked, and saw man naked, and from the centre of his own crystal.… There was nothing of the superior person about him. This makes him terrifying.274

  Precisely because they aren’t trying to push or promote themselves, a true Spirit person often occurs as “terrifying.” They won’t manipulate you, and you always know you can’t manipulate them. Saints living in the circle dance of love are often a scary anomaly. They are not subject to our usual system of rewards, punishments, and payoffs.

  They’re not in it for “filthy lucre,” like most of the rest of us are. Francis told us to treat money like dung! Was he naive or was he free? There is no top he needed to get to, since he had already found the top—at the bottom.

  Many Spirit people strike fear in the hearts of the guardians of the status quo—or of any kind of privilege. Once you are in the “general dance,” as Thomas Merton called it,275 you have no need to make your attention-grabbing movements over in the corner.

  Such people are natural myth-makers; they’re natural reformers. They change reality, not even by trying to but by simply showing up in this new way with an agenda so new it’s no agenda at all, beyond living as part of the circle of praise.

  Their presence is contagious. Their very inner freedom calls you to match its frequency within yourself. Thus, the Spirit is mostly an energetic presence; you can often tell when a person is in the Spirit because they are simultaneously unself-conscious and radiant, connected to their own circuit. It allows them to be spontaneous and quietly original.

  As Scripture attests, the Spirit blows where she will;276 you’re never going to be able to control her or categorize her. You’re never going to be able to define her. You’re never going to be able to put her in your conceptual or denominational pocket and say, “We’ve captured the Spirit, and we alone can dole her out,” yet so many of us practice our religion like we’re Holy Ghost-busters, building the perfect traps! The Spirit cannot be constrained through altar-call formulas, pitch-perfect theology, or any confirmation ceremony. These are often attempts to domesticate, “grieve,” or “sadden” the Spirit277 without even knowing it. It happens easily whenever we confuse the Spirit with order and control instead of energy and life. The charismatic and Pentecostal movements have much to teach the mainline churches here. For one thing, they have a much stronger record of actually healing people, emotionally, physically, and relationally.

  Ken Wilber points out that much church organization is at the “mythic-membership” level of consciousness, which often breeds complacency to real human suffering, in-group smugness, and little else.278

  I’ve been a priest for over forty-five years now; sometimes when I look out over the crowd at Mass, I can see a passive resistance over much of the congregation’s faces. Even when I’m giving what I take to be a risky and life-giving message. They are conditioned to expect nothing. They’ve gotten so used to these gatherings not being meaningful that they no longer know how to allow them to touch their heart or change their mind. The Holy Spirit is again the Missing Person of the Blessed Trinity.

  Without the free flow of the Holy Spirit, religion becomes a tribal sorting system, spending much time trying to define who’s in and who’s out—who’s right and who’s wrong. And surprise, we’re always on the side of right!

  What are the odds?

  Yet refining, and any sorting that may or may not need to be done—that is the work of God. It’s not our problem. It really isn’t. Your problem isn’t to decide who is going to heaven and who is going to hell, especially when you realize those are mostly present-tense descriptions before they are ever future destinations.

  Your job is simply to exemplify heaven now. God will take it from there.

  Here is the remedy when you find it hard to exemplify heaven now: Let love happen.

  Remember, you cannot “get there”; you can only be here.

  Love is just like prayer; it is not so much an action that we do but a reality that we already are. We don’t decide to “be loving.” The Father doesn’t decide to love the Son. Fatherhood is the flow from Father to Son, 100 percent. The Son does not choose now and then to release some love to the Father, or to the Spirit. Love is their full modus operandi!

  The love in you—which is the Spirit in you—always somehow says yes.279 Love is not something you do; love is someone you are. It is your True Self.280 Love is where you came from and love is where you’re going. It’s not something you can buy. It’s not something you can attain. It is the presence of God within you, called the Holy Spirit—or what some theologians name uncreated grace.

  You can’t manufacture this by any right conduct, dear reader. You can’t make God love you one ounce more than God already loves you right now.

  You can’t.

  You can go to church every day for the rest of your life. God isn’t going to love you any more than God loves you right now. You cannot make God love you any less, either—not an ounce less. Do the most terrible thing—steal and pillage, cheat and lie—and God wouldn’t love you less. You cannot change the Divine mind about you! The flow is constant, total, and 100 percent toward your life. God is for you.

  We can’t diminish God’s love for us. What we can do, however, is learn how to believe it, receive it, trust it, allow it, and celebrate it, accepting Trinity’s whirling invitation to join in the cosmic dance.

  That’s why all spirituality comes down to how you’re doing life right now.

  How you’re doing right now is a microcosm of the whole of your life.

  How you do anything is how you do everything.

  St. Bernard says, “In those respects in which the soul is unlike God, it is also unlike itself. And in those ways in which the soul is most unlike itself, it is most unlike God.”281 Bernard has, of course, come to the same thing we’re trying to say here: the pattern within the Trinity is the same as the pattern in all creation. And when you return to this same pattern, the flow will be identical.

  Catherine LaCugna ends her giant theological tome with this one simple sentence; it’s taken her two-and-a-half inches of book to get to this one line, and its simplicity might overwhelm you, but I can’t end in any better place than she does:

  The very nature of God, therefore, is to seek out the deepest possible communion and friendship with every last creature on this earth.282

  That’s the job description of God. That’s wh
at it’s all about. And the only thing that can keep you out of this divine dance is fear and doubt, or any self-hatred. What would happen in your life—right now—if you accepted what God has created and even allowed?

  Suddenly, this is a very safe universe.

  You have nothing to be afraid of.

  God is for you.

  God is leaping toward you!

  God is on your side, honestly more than you are on your own.

  * * *

  254. Kruger, Shack Revisited, 247.

  255. Ibid., 64.

  256. Chardin, “Sketch of a Personal Universe,” 72, https://cac.org/the-shape-of-the-universe-is-love-2016-02-29/.

  257. See 1 John 4:8, 16.

  258. See John 1:1–18.

  259. See John 1:14.

  260. See, for example, Mark 1:11.

  261. See Acts 1:4–5; see also, for example, John 1:32–33.

  262. Read Ephesians 4:4–7 anew!

  263. Evelyn Underhill, Practical Mysticism (self-published by Renaissance Classics; printed by CreateSpace, Charleston, SC, 2012), 2.

  264. See, for example, Psalm 19:1.

  265. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” Poems and Prose, ed. W. H. Gardner (New York: Penguin Classics, reprinted edition, 1963), 51.

  266. David Friend and the editors of Life magazine, eds., The Meaning of Life: Reflections in Words and Pictures on Why We Are Here (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1991), 11.

  267. See Ephesians 5:21.

  268. St. Augustine, “Ten Homilies on the First Epistle of John.”

  269. See Acts 2.

  270. Howard Thurman, Disciplines of the Spirit (Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 1977), 21. First edition by Harper and Row, 1963.

  271. See Luke 9:54.

  272. See 2 Kings 1:10.

  273. As the song “Holy Now” (1999) attests so eloquently. See petermayer.net.

  274. T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Forgotten Books, 2012), 140. Originally published in 1920.

  275. See Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, reprint edition: New Directions Paperbook 1091 (New York: New Directions Books, 2007), chapter 39, “The General Dance.”

  276. See John 3:8.

  277. See Ephesians 4:30.

  278. Ken Wilber, “The Integral Vision at the Millennium” (part 1), excerpts from the introduction to volume seven of The Collected Works of Ken Wilber (Boston: Shambhala, 2000), www.fudomouth.net/thinktank/now_integralvision.htm.

  279. See 2 Corinthians 1:20.

  280. See Richard Rohr, Immortal Diamond (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2013) for a thorough teaching on your True Self and how to access it.

  281. Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2009), 11. First published by Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1945.

  282. Catherine Mowry LaCugna, God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), 411.

  Acknowledgments

  From Richard Rohr and Mike Morrell

  A book is in many ways like a birth: a person (or a couple) are seen as primarily doing the beautiful, excruciating work of bringing new life into the world, but the reality is that it takes a village. So many amazing people contributed to the formation of The Divine Dance, and we’d like to acknowledge some of you right here. We’re surely not recalling every contribution; please forgive us in advance.

  At the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, Joelle Chase, Vanessa Guerin, and Michael Poffenberger are part of our team that makes everything happen, from conferences to Daily Meditations e-mail, to in-house publications like the ONEING Journal, to our growing Living School. In addition to this, these three—along with Tim King, working remotely from his farm in New Hampshire—have stepped up “above and beyond” to ensure that this book is birthed not only from us, but an entire global community of engaged contemplatives and activists. Thanks to them and the entire CAC team for their work in this process.

  The team at Whitaker House has been nothing but encouraging, engaged, and excited about bringing this somewhat unusual book about the Trinity into the world. From acquisitions editor Don Milam to the publishers, publicists, editors, and designers—including Bob and Christine Whitaker, Cathy Hickling, Lois Puglisi, Tom Cox, Jim Armstrong—thank you for creating a hospitable home for this project.

  To Turner Simkins and Jeremy Mace at NewFire Media, and Chris LaTondresse—thank you for helping this book reach as many engaged readers as possible.

  To CAC board member and literary agent Christopher Ferebee, who stewarded this book wisely.

  Thanks so much to Paul Young, dear brother, for providing the inspired foreword.

  Thank you to all the endorsers who see value in these words.

  Naming everyone who has exerted a spiritual or literary influence on these pages would be impossible; please see the footnotes to feast on their wisdom!

  From Richard Rohr

  This book would never have happened if Mike Morrell had not approached me with a kind offer to take material from two of my conferences, The Divine Dance and The Shape of God, and put them into written form. Not only did he graciously and creatively send me initial sample copy, but he then did so much more by his expansion of certain ideas, arrangement of the material into sequential parts, subheadings, very creative titles, and the hard work of looking up many quotes and ideas that surely needed citation.

  When he also added his own younger Generation X/Millennial-age flair, formatting, examples, and vocabulary, the result is the exciting book you now are about to read. Thank you, dear Michael. You are not a “ghost writer” but a Spirit rider!

  Michael was also able to invite the inspired William Paul Young, author of the worldwide best-selling novel The Shack, to write the foreword, which he so kindly did—and which you can now enjoy. All three of us are now committed, along with the very kind and fully cooperative folks at Whitaker House Publishers, to reintroduce the Mystery of the Divine Trinity to a hungry world.

  How presumptuous to think we could do this, but all we are really doing is riding the Flow. How can we not?

  From Mike Morrell

  At the risk of mild contradiction, this book would never have happened had Fr. Richard not taken the risk of exploring an unusual writing process with someone he knew primarily as an event organizer and publicist! Thank you, Fr. Richard, for your graciousness, trust, and enthusiasm for this project from beginning to end—especially during what has been a busy season in your life and the life of the Center for Action and Contemplation.

  To my family—my wife, Jasmin, and daughters, Jubilee Grace and Nova Rain: Thank you for creating space for Hubs and Dad (respectively) to work on The Book, in addition to everything else we have going on in our rich, unpredictable life together. Your love inspires me to recognize the Love that animates the Dance!

  To my “day job” that is so much more at Presence International; thank you for living what we preach, that collaboration is better than competition, and we all grow stronger together. As we continue to host “A Global Conversation for a New Earth,” thank you for seeing the value in my connecting with such amazing conversation partners as Fr. Richard and the CAC.

  For me, spirituality does not happen in a vacuum. Throughout all the ages and stages of my life, concrete, embodied faith communities have inspired me, challenged me, given me something to rail against, and nourished me. Here’s to the spaces that have raised me, sharpened me, and taught me to dance in the light of Trinity across three decades: Douglasville First Baptist; Lithia Springs Assemblies of God; Harvester Presbyterian; the unnamed, neighborhood-bas
ed, decentralized house churches of Lithia Springs, Georgia, and Raleigh, North Carolina; the late, lamented (and aptly-named) Trinity’s Place; and North Raleigh Community Church.

  And finally: To you, dear reader—may these pages open your life to new stages: of communion, belonging, and living in the Flow.

  Appendix

  Experiencing the Trinity: Seven Practices

  Let’s be honest: reading about the divine dance that animates the cosmos and draws us in is nice, but to really be grounded in our daily experience, we have to put this into practice! How can we discover Trinity in our everyday lives and relationships?

  The following exercises invite the participant into this conscious and loving flow, this movement into the Life we are calling Trinity.

  They should each help you in having your own inner experience of the One Life moving in you. Unless you sincerely try them, you have no reason to say they do not “work” their mystery. The future of mature Christianity will be practice-based more than merely belief-based, which gives us nothing to argue about until we try it for ourselves.

  Are you ready to open yourself—to vulnerability, to risk, to relationship? If so, let’s begin!

  1. Move: The Sign of the Cross

  Going back to the first two centuries of both Eastern and Western Christianity, there emerged a simple form of body prayer, sometimes called “Blessing Oneself” or “Signing Oneself,” wherein you traced the image of the cross with your hands over the upper part of your body.