The Trinity Dance

"Real community has to be found at its source—inside the Trinity itself. Father, Son, and Spirit share the most breathtaking dance of community in the universe."

- Wayne Jacobsen. Beyond Sundays 

God is Cruel Like Me? Oh Boy!

I once saw God, as through a window l peered;
He was just as I suspected,
just as I feared.
So selfish and cruel He appeared to be;
So very ugly,
so unlike me.
Then I looked deeper, still deeper with time;
T‘was a minor all along,

and the image was mine," 

- Ty Gibson

You thought I was just like you. —Yahweh (PS 50:21)

17 You hate my instruction and cast my words behind you. 18 When you see a thief, you join with him; you throw in your lot with adulterers. 19 You use your mouth for evil and harness your tongue to deceit. 20 You sit and testify against your brother and slander your own mother’s son. 21 When you did these things and I kept silent, you thought I was exactly like you. Psalms 50:17-21 (NIV)

God Isn't "Out There" So Give It Up

When I was on retreat at Thomas Merton’s hermitage at Gethsemani Abbey in 1985, I had a chance encounter that has stayed with me all these years. I was walking down a little trail when I recognized a recluse, what you might call a hermit’s hermit, coming toward me. Not wanting to intrude on his deep silence, I bowed my head and moved to the side of the path, intending to walk past him. But as we neared each other, he said, “Richard!” That surprised me. He was supposed to be silent. How did he know who I was? “Richard, you get chances to preach and I don’t. Tell the people one thing.” Pointing to the sky, he said, “God is not ‘out there’!” Then he said, “God bless you,” and abruptly continued down the path.

The belief that God is “out there” is the basic dualism that is tearing us all apart. Our view of God as separate and distant has harmed our relationships with sexuality, food, possessions, money, animals, nature, politics, and our own incarnate selves. This loss explains why we live such distraught and divided lives. Jesus came to put it all together for us and in us. He was saying, in effect, “To be human is good! The material and the physical can be trusted and enjoyed. This physical world is the hiding place of God and the revelation place of God!”

~ Richard Rohr.  Daily Meditation. January 5, 2018

God Loves You More......

"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."

(Richard Rohr. The Divine Dance)

Terrifying Spirit Person

"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 (trinitarian) 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......

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, you have no need to make your attention-grabbing movements over in the corner."

(Richard Rohr. The Divine Dance)

A Living Dance To The Triune God

"The Spirit’s passion is to bring her anointing of humanity in Jesus to full and personal and abiding expression in us [as unique persons], and not only in us personally, but in our relationship with the Father through the Son, and in our relationships with one another, and indeed with the earth and all creation…. 254 Until the whole cosmos is a living sacrament of the great dance of the triune God."

(Richard Rohr. The Divine Dance)

Trinity Explained

"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."

~Richard Rohr. The Divine Dance

Living A Stingy Vengeful Christian Life

"If you are still a black-and-white, rigid thinker who needs certitude and control at every step—well, the Trinity will feel out of reach. Grace shows up where logic breaks down, so you won’t go very far. No matter what passage is given to you, you will interpret it in a stingy, vengeful, controlling way—because that’s the way you do life."

~Richard Rohr. The Divine

God Does Not Dominate Trinity Displays

"Stop idolizing the so-called “1 percent.” There’s nothing worthwhile up there that is not also down here. Worst of all, it has given 99 percent of the world an unnecessary and tragic inferiority complex.

Trinity says that God’s power is not domination, threat, or coercion, but instead is of a totally different nature, one that even Jesus’ followers have not yet adjusted to. If the Father does not dominate the Son, and the Son does not dominate the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit does not dominate the Father or the Son, then there’s no domination in God. All divine power is shared power, which should have entirely changed Christian politics and relationships.

There’s no seeking of power over in the Trinity, but only power with—a giving away, a sharing, a letting go, and thus an infinity of trust and mutuality. This has the power to change all relationships: in marriage, in culture, and even in international relations."

(Richard Rohr. The Divine Dance)

There Could Be Three

"This is precisely the behavior we’d expect in a binary system— a place of “two-ness” in opposition. At best, when we’re finished yelling at each other, we might try to compromise and form some kind of “synthesis” position out of our dialectic. This is how the philosopher Hegel saw the world: one of dueling dualisms. But the Law of Three asks the question we’ve been asking: What if we don’t live in a binary universe, but instead a ternary universe? If three-ness captures the essence of the cosmos more than two-ness, it means that we can hold our first-force or second-force perspectives iith earnestness, while fully awaiting some third force to arrive and surprise us all out of our neat little boxes."

~ Richard Rohr. The Divine Dance

Held Or Holding God?

"We’re standing in the middle of an awesome mystery— life itself!— and the only appropriate response before this mystery is humility. If we’re resolved that this is where we want to go— into the mystery, not to hold God and reality but to let God and reality hold us— then I think religion is finally in its proper and appropriate place."

(Richard Rohr. The Divine Dance)

Our Christian Pharoah View Of God

"What physicists and contemplatives alike are confirming is that the foundational nature of reality is relational; everything is in relationship with everything else. As a central Christian mystery, we’ve been saying this from the very beginning while still utterly failing to grasp its meaning. Even though, as confessional Christians, none of us would have denied the Trinitarian mystery, in essence we did. As described earlier, for all practical purposes, those of us raised Christian grew up with a monarchical God, a Pharaoh sitting at the top of a great pyramid. Right? We grew up as functioning monarchists…while the revolution of Trinity remained humbly hidden in plain sight. “Oh yeah, I know God is three persons, but what does that really mean?”

(Richard Rohr. The Divine Dance)

Everything is Relationship

"What physicists and contemplatives alike are confirming is that the foundational nature of reality is relational; everything is in relationship with everything else. As a central Christian mystery, we’ve been saying this from the very beginning while still utterly failing to grasp its meaning."

(Richard Rohr. The Divine Dance)

Living In The Fire Of The Trinity

"To have found God, to have experienced him in the intimacy of our being, to have lived even for one hour in the fire of his Trinity and the bliss of his Unity clearly makes us say: "Now I understand. You alone are enough for me.""

(From the God who Comes by Carlo Carretto. Sited in Rueben Job, & Norman Shawchuch. A Guide To Prayer)