THE TRINITY AND THE KINGDOM

Over the years I've reflected many times on the two topics of the Holy Trinity and the Kingdom of God.  (You can use the "Labels" list in the column to the left of the screen to click on each of these topics for a more thorough treatment of each.) 

On this Trinity Sunday, June 15, I'd like to reflect on how similar these two mysteries are. I hope my brief summaries of the Trinity and the Kingdom will be of some help.

 GOD AS TRINITY

The Holy Trinity is the complete expression of God’s Love. When a family is faithful, their love transforms itself into the image of the Holy Trinity on earth. The Holy Trinity, like the family, is above all a mystery of unity. Love is union. Two spouses who love one another are united, and two distinct persons who become one: “And the two shall become one flesh.” This unity and diversity of two-in-one helps us to understand the Trinity: Three in One, three distinct persons in a unity of love.

The Holy Trinity, like the family, is a mystery of fruitful love and unity. The man and woman who love each other participate in the creative power of God, in the Love that gives life. The child is the living image of the parents’ love, just as in the Trinity, where the Son is the perfect Image of God.

If God is a Trinity of distinct persons, then God is relation-ship. To make it sound more real you can say that God is family. If that’s so, then you need to approach the mystery of the Holy Trinity with more than just your mind -- you need an open heart. To grasp more about the Trinity you have to be ready to receive God into your life, this God who is boundless, unconditional love.

God is family. We are all family. Think of that the next time you’re thinking ill of someone, especially someone who hates you. No matter who that person is, you have to say to yourself, “I better be real careful because after all that person is family.”

If your God's love has boundaries around it and is limited to only certain people, then that is not the Triune God of the Christian faith, but a God with boundaries. A god with boundaries is obviously not much of a God, but rather an idol.

Our belief in the Trinity, in God as Family, challenges us to open our hearts in LOVE to all of creation. Sure we may fall short of this, but the Trinity is like that -- something we never quite get completely.

On our end, we can deflect or interrupt the Flow of love in our lives, we can isolate ourselves from the divine circle dance, but the Spirit is always working to draw us back into it.

 

THE KINGDOM

In the gospels Jesus tells his disciples, “The kingdom of God is among you.” The kingdom that Jesus began is a whole new way of relating with God and with one another, that is, a whole new way of filling the space between us.

The kingdom exists not so much inside each of us as in the spaces between each of us. We get to decide the character of each of those spaces. I freely choose how to fill that space between me and a student, say, or between me and a street beggar, of between me and a brother monk, and so on.

The Kingdom, then is all about relationships of LOVE.

And the Trinity, too, it turns out, is all about relationships of LOVE.

The two deepest mysteries of our faith, then, are about the same thing: LOVE:

THE HOLY TRINITY: God's mysterious internal life of the mutual love of three persons and infinite love for us creatures.

THE KINGDOM OF GOD: The Love that comes about in the spaces, the relationships between God and us and our neighbors.

La Santisima Trinidad - C. Cervantez

THE NEED TO DANCE

During the past week, I have been re-reading Richard Rohr’s book "The Divine dance.” This must be my third time reading it, and as often happens, I am finding in it important helps that I had not seen before.

The main thesis of the book is that the center of our faith is the mystery of the Holy Trinity. Contrary to what we in the Western World have been traditionally taught, God is not some lone Being observing the world from a distance, but rather God is a Trinity, God is the relationship of three persons - or as Saint John puts it, "God is love."

This triune God invites each of us to join in the eternal dance of love that exists between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We are a part of that divine dance. And, a more shocking way of putting it, the dance is in us, just as God dwells in each of us.

I have been meditating on this image for a week now, and it has been really helpful in moving Myself out of the center of my spiritual life, and inviting me instead to abandon myself and join in this circle dance, the Divine Dance of Father, Son, and Spirit.

This metaphor makes so much more sense than the image of a Lonesome God sitting on top of a mountain, detached from all of creation. The circle dance includes every created being, from electrons dancing around the nuclei of atoms, to mosquitoes and camels, and planets circling around their suns.

Rohr points out how modern astronomy and physics keep discovering that everything exists in relationship to other things - subatomic particles orbit being attracted and repelled by each other, etc., and certainly planets and stars and black holes and galaxies all show the same circular pattern. 

The latest insight that the book has given me is to correct my image of the Dance:  All of us creatures who are dancing in the Circle are imperfect by definition, and so each of us keeps making missteps. God provides the Perfection, we just have to provide the Love as we stumble through the steps with our equally imperfect sisters and brothers.

I imagine that at the end of time we'll all be dancing in perfect sync with the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. But until that Day we will all keep dancing in hope, forgving all those imperfect steps -- our own  and our neighbors'.

I highly recommend Father Rohr’s “The Divine Dance,” especially if you are prepared to completely shift your thinking about your relationship with God, with others, and with all of creation!

HOW JESUS READ THE BIBLE

I’ve been rereading Richard Rohr’s “the Divine Dance” the past couple of weeks. I came across this passage just this morning:

Does this Look like Jesus' abba?

“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.… no matter what passage [of the Bible] is given you, you will interpret it in a stingy, vengeful, controlling way — because that’s the way you do life.” 138

Let me offer another passage from Richard Rohr, that can serve as my post for today:

In my book “Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality,¨ I described the Bible itself as a gradual progression forward. Do you see the narrative arc moving toward an ever-more-developed theology of grace until in Jesus it becomes grace personified? But it’s a concept that the psyche is never fully ready for. We resist it, and so you will see in most of the biblical text what the late anthropologist René Gérard calls a “text in travail,” a suffering text.  And we must see that is still true in the New Testament, where even John’s statements about God’s unconditional love are still interspersed with many lines that seem to imply a conditional love, too: “IF you obey my Commandments“ is either directly said, or implied many times. To grow in the ways of love, I think this shows real genius. Psychologically, humans actually need some conditional love to lead us toward the recognition of and the need for unconditional love. …

We get the promise of free love (grace) now and then, but it is always too much for the mind and hard to believe.

The biblical text mirrors both the growth and the resistance of the soul.

NOT a quote from Jesus!

It falls into the mystery, and then it says, “that just can’t be true.” Scripture is a polyphonic symphony, a conversation with itself, where it plays melodies and dissonance. — three steps forward, two steps back. The three steps gradually and finally win out; you see the momentum of our Holy Book and where it is leading history. And the text moves inexorably toward inclusivity, mercy, unconditional, love, and forgiveness. I call it the “Jesus hermeneutic.” Just interpret scripture the way that Jesus did! He ignores, denies, or openly opposes his own Scriptures whenever they are imperialistic, punitive, exclusionary, or tribal. Check it out for yourself. 137

One of the many interesting lines above is the description of what happens to the soul when it finally starts to comprehend the infinite all-forgiving love of God. The soul says, “that just can’t be true.” We need to pray for the gift of Faith, so that we can believe that the Good News that Jesus came to teach us is indeed true.

Obviously there is a lot of background missing from this post, but you can read more on this topic in the book mentioned above, “the Divine Dance” (which Amazon offers on ebook for $2.99). I also love another of his many books: “Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality,¨

Glory be to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,

and may we all join them in the Divine Dance!

WOULD YOU LIKE TO DANCE?

 

J.S Mill

The story is told about the famous British philosopher, John Stewart Mill. It seems that he kept having a recurring dream, one that he sensed was very important. But each morning, when he awoke, he could never remember what the dream had said. So one night, as he went to bed, he put a pen and a sheet of paper on his nightstand, hoping to capture the message. 

When he woke up the next morning, he remembered to look at the paper, and sure enough, there was the message captured in four words: “Think in different terms.“

In the gospels, the Pharisees are stuck inside of their system of ideas, the series of laws and regulations that assure them of God’s favor. So they, of course, cannot recognize or accept Christ for who he is — they simply cannot think in different terms.

In the first reading at mass this morning (Saturday), we see Paul addressing this very issue of thinking in different terms. It reads in part: 

“consequently, from now, on we regard no one according to the flesh, even if we once knew Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know him so no longer. So whoever is in Christ is a new creation: the old things have passed away; behold, new things have come.” (2 Cor.5)

I happen to be rereading Richard Rohr’s book on the Trinity, “the Divine Dance,” in which he proposes that we Christians need to see the mystery of God very differently from the way we are used to doing. We have to let go of the model of the power pyramid, with God the Father at the top, like the pagan god Zeus on Mount Olympus exercising power and domination on everything below.

Rohr challenges us to let go of that image in favor of an older one, that of the Divine Circle dance, of the three persons of the trinity, who invite us to join in the dance with them. In this model it's all about relationships, and there is no room for domination, mastery, punishment, or terror. I recommend the book if you have not read it already, especially since I can’t even scratch the surface of Rohr’s ideas here.

But let me offer a footnote from the new American Bible for the passage quoted above: “The death of Christ described in 2 Cor 5:14-15 produces a whole new order and a new mode of perception (verse 16). “According to the flesh“: the natural mode of perception, characterized as "fleshly," is replaced by a mode of perception proper to the spirit. Elsewhere Paul contrasts what Christ looks like according to the old criteria (weakness, powerlessness, folly, death), and according to the new (wisdom, power, life)….“

If we look at the world with the eyes of the spirit, everything changes. Hardship, suffering, even death, all take on a new significance. All of our human efforts appear very different through this new lens. You may recognize this as the "Paschal Mystery" that's at the center of our Easter Faith.

This past week's feasts of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and  the Immaculate Heart of Mary make so much more sense if we "think in different terms:" Instead of from the starting point of a God who is all powerful and who dominates everything in creation, begin with the Trinity, a God who is relationship, three divine persons engaged in a circle dance of love to which we are all invited.

A GIFT AND A CHALLENGE

This Sunday, June 4, is the solemn celebration of the mystery of the Holy Trinity. It's always a challenge to try to reduce this seemingly abstract article of faith to something that you and I can apply to our everyday lives. It occurs to me that our belief in the mystery of the Holy Trinity can give a richer meaning to a gospel verse that I meditated on recently. The verse is from John's account of the Last Supper, in which he lets us listen in on an intimate discussion between Jesus and his Father, giving us a glimpse into the intimate inner life shared by Jesus and his Father. The verse is this:

“And I gave them the glory (Greek δόξα, doxa) you gave me, / so that they may be one as we are one” (John 17:22).

According to Jesus, then, you and I have a share in the “greatness, glory” that Jesus shares with the Father. The dictionary suggests that the meaning of doxa here is “the state of being great and wonderful.“ How can that be? I don’t know,

It would seem that Jesus is leaving us with a challenge: to live up to that gift of doxa. It’s an impossible goal to live up to: to become "great and wonderful." But this is where the Holy Spirit comes to our help. It's not a project that we undertake to make ourselves wonderful and great. After all, the words "wonderful and great our words used of God. Notice how the quotation above begins: “and I gave them the doxa you gave me.” Jesus tells us that he is handing the same characteristics on to you and me. So, doxa is actually a gift that you and I have already been given. We simply need to accept the gift, which means letting it work in our hearts, our minds, and our actions.

The early fathers of the church liked to say that in the incarnation God became human so that we might become divine. And in this word doxa we start to see how that can happen: by cooperating with Jesus‘ gift to us, and imitating him by our way acting, thinking and being in the world. We can't of course, pull this off by ourselves, which is where the Third Person of the Trinity comes in: The Holy Spirit comes down upon us with the gifts we need in order to become "great and wonderful." The traditional list of the seven "gifts of the Holy Spirit" includes wisdom, understanding, counsel, knowledge, fortitude, piety, and fearofthe Lord. But in a word, we share in God's doxa by loving.

This brings us to the second half of the verse quoted above, in which Jesus continuous, “so that they may

be one, as we are one.” If such a prayer for unity seems pretty far-fetched these days, we should remember that through the power of the Spirit Jesus' prayer will indeed be fulfilled one day. And you and I, because of the gift of doxa that Jesus has given us, and with the help of the Holy Spirit, must begin working toward that unity, starting in our own lives with our way of loving and relating with our family, friends, neighbors, coworkers, and so on. Working toward the unity of all humanity is part of our vocation, one way of living out the gift of doxa that our Savior gave us, to be like God, “wonderful and great.”

May God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, continue to do his divinizing work in you and me!

TRINITY - AGAIN (AND AGAIN)

 

Tomorrow is Trinity Sunday. After celebrating the events of Easter, the Ascension and Pentecost, the Solemnity of the Holy Trinity is so abstract and seemingly removed from our everyday lives that the pews tomorrow morning will be filled with faithful Christians politely stifling yawns. I sense that often the homilist is doing he same. This estrangement from the rich mystery of the Holy Trinity is one of the central tragedies of Western Christianity.

Each year I post or re-post some reflections on the Trinity with the hope that someone reading them may begin to peer again into this most beautiful and most neglected part of our faith.

 I've now read Richard Rohr's  The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation at least four times; in this post I'll try to summarize some of his main thoughts.

Rohr points out that some of the greatest difficulties that people (both believers and non-believers) have with Christianity are avoided it we change our perspective and stop thinking of God as an isolated monarch observing the world from afar and occasionally intruding into it, and who seems intent on keeping count of sins in order to punish us for them when we die. Fr. Rohr proposes that we look at God in an entirely different way -- in terms of the ancient model of "trinity" which never caught on in the Western world, but has been at the center of the theology of the Eastern churches, and is behind much of St. Paul's thought.  

An understanding of God as Trinity is such a radically different way of looking at the divine, that I have to keep re-reading it to let my mind adjust to the new perspective. And each time I read one of it short chapters, the new perspective makes more and more sense. I think I've blogged about it already, but the book is really worth further reflection.

Here are the notes of a talk I gave to the parents of the Religious Education Program Here at St. Mary's Church. I offer them because, although it was a gamble to try to treat the topic in a short time,  the parents seemed to "get it," and had lots of good questions at the end.  So, here goes: Richard Rohr with an admixture of Fr. Albert.

IS GOD A “SUBSTANCE?”

Aristotle  (Greek philosopher 384-322 B.C.) composed a list of ten qualities or “categories” of things (e.g. "location", “quantity” and “quality”). For our purposes we need to consider just two of these: “SUBSTANCE” and “RELATIONSHIP”.

A “Substance” is something independent of everything else (a tree, a stone), while “Relationship” obviously requires something else for its existence (daughter, father).  Substance was for Aristotle the highest category, precisely because it does not depend on anything else for its existence, but can stand on its own.

By 2nd-3rd Century, Western Christianity found itself using Aristotle to prove that this God of ours, the Holy Trinity, was a substance. We wanted a “substantial” God, a god whom we could prove was as good as any pagan god. And so it was that God became an object of our study, just like any other thing in the created world. (Can you see trouble coming?)

GOD AS ZEUS

Several weeks ago I was sitting in on a class of seniors as they studied Homer's Odessey. I was startled to hear one of the warriors praying to "Father Zeus." I could see how easy it would have been for converts from Greek pagan religions encountering Jesus’ idea of "God the Father," to immediately identify Jesus’ “God the Father” with their familiar Greek "Father Zeus," the all-powerful one who sat alone on top of Mt. Olympus and hurled thunderbolts on people any time he felt like it, but especially when he got angry.

This image of a vengeful, fearsome Zeus-God whose approval is only conditional and can be lost or earned, could not be farther from the doctrine of the Trinity, in which God is pure love. Since God is love, God can't not-love us, no matter what we do. God can never stop loving us. On our end, however, we are free to deflect or interrupt the Flow of divine love in our lives -- that's called sin, which is its own built-in punishment, and hardly needs God to intrude in order to punish us for being outside the dance.

SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF ZEUS-BASED RELIGION

The Zeus-God keeps score; he gets even, he metes out punishment to those who don’t measure up.

Zeus-based religion becomes the grim pursuit of mastery over a system of requirements and obligations.

A Zeus-based saint is someone who has mastered the system and knows how to avoid getting God angry, and who scores very high on all the criteria for holiness. 

GOD AS TRINITY

Western Christianity is so bound up with this image of a solitary vengeful, fearsome Zeus-God sitting alone atop mount Olympus, whose approval can be earned and lost, that we find it nearly impossible to get along without this kind of God. This God is, after all, very comprehensible -- there’s no mystery involved, and in such a view God follows all of our rational rules and expectations.

But this image could not be farther from the idea of God as Trinity, as the flow of love in the world. The Trinity is a divine, universal circle dance that includes all of creation, from electrons whirling around nuclei to galaxies strewn across the immensity of space. We humans are included in the dance, in the “flow.” 

If God is Love, then, by definition, God can't “not-love,” no matter what we do. God can never stop loving us. 

On our end, we can deflect or interrupt the Flow of love in our lives, we can isolate ourselves from the divine circle dance, but the Spirit is always working to draw us back into it.

Jesus in the gospels reveals himself as “Son of the Father” and “one with the Father,” giving clear primacy to relationship. God is not, nor does God need to be a “substance”  in the sense of something independent of all else: God is relationship itself! Although it took Christians a couple of centuries to come up with the doctrine of the Trinity of Father, Son and Spirit, Jesus already spoke about “I and the Father are one,” and said “the Spirit blows where it will.”

And St. John wrote that “God is love, ” God is relationship, while St. Paul wrote lots of tantalizing things that work best from a trinitarian perspective.

The Father, Son and Spirit love one another, God is this mutual loving, the Divine Dance. And we are all involved it that Dance, along with everyone and everything in creation, from neutrons and molecules to exploding stars and galaxies.

SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF “TRINITARIAN” RELIGION

Holiness: A holy person is one who can stay in relationship at all costs.

-People who are toxic (psychopaths etc.) are always people who cannot maintain relationships - they run from them. Loners, lonely people, cut off from others.

“Sin” means blocking the flow of the Trinity’s love and conversely

a “saint” is one who allows that love to flow freely and visibly in his or her life.

Salvation is the readiness, the capacity, the willingness to stay in relationship.

The Holy Spirit helps us in this difficult task of maintaining relationships. If we refuse to give others any power or influence over us (“You’re not gonna convince me!” “You have nothing to teach me.”) then we’re spiritually dead.

Kingdom of God, the central metaphor of Christ’s teaching: "My kingdom is not of this earth." It is a new way of relating to God, to others and to self. The Kingdom is relationships: it’s what characterizes the spaces between us: love, forgiveness, generosity.

Most of Rohr's comments about the Trinity are not his, but reflect the thinking of many saints, mystics and theologians over the centuries whose thoughts and writings have been overshadowed by the Aristotelian mindset of the Western Church. On Trinity Sunday we might pray that one day our modern western idea of God may give way to a Trinitarian concept of a God who is unconditional love and who is the dynamic force that animates all of creation, inviting us to become part of the Divine Dance. 

GOD AS FAMILY

 

Sunday May 30 is Trinity Sunday. The past few years
on this Sunday I've re-used ideas from Richard Rohr's book, "The Divine Dance," an excellent treatment of the central but mostly-ignored mystery of our faith. By definition, you can never fully unpack the significance of this mystery, so I just keep rereading my previous reflections, always finding new insights. The following includes some thoughts I first posted in June, 2013. 

Did you ever try to define “family?” It’s not easy. Not just because of the current cultural upheaval that’s re-shaping the concept of family for good or for ill, but simply because the notion of “family” is not easy to define. Everyone knows what we mean by the word, but it’s hard to capture the concept or reduce it to a definition. That’s because you have to understand “family” with your heart, not your head.

A kid who is being gypped by not having a supportive family around him cannot give you a precise definition of a supportive family environment, but he feels the experience deep in his gut. In a lot of ways, then, it’s legitimate to say that the notion of family is a “mystery,” something you understand, but will never understand fully because it’s too big to grasp.

GOD AS FAMILY

Of all our beliefs as Christians, the one that means least to many of us is the Mystery of the Holy Trinity, three persons in one God. By calling it a “mystery” we’re saying that we’ll never come to a complete understanding of it. We are NOT saying that we can’t understand anything about the Trinity -- we can and do understand plenty about it. To prove my point I’d like to present one way of unpacking a little bit more about the Triune Godhead: To say that “God is Trinity” is to say that “God is FAMILY.”

That’s why it’s easier to understand the Trinity with your heart than with your head. We all know what a family is. We’ve all experienced family, we’ve been born and grown up in one, and perhaps have started families of our own. Yet there is no perfect definition of a family.

There are so many things that make up a family. It’s the house or apartment to which we retreat every day to relax and be ourselves. It’s a place exclusively ours, where we can talk, laugh and cry. Family is above all our father and mother and the love that unites them. Family is the children, the table at which we eat, and the dusty photo album filled with memories of members long gone.

So, what if we say that God is FAMILY? Then we’re saying that God is love, warmth, closeness and relationship.

God the FATHER is God and his omnipotent power and vigor to create, to bring life to the universe. God the SON is the reflection of God, God’s self-revelation to us, the Word become flesh. God the SPIRIT is the love that unites the Father and the Son and extends to us humans – which brings us to the really good news.

GOD’S OPEN FAMILY

Especially during the COVID confinement past 14 months or so, many of us have experienced how ur human families are often rather closed, like a possession we guard jealously, something special intended only for people related by blood. We’ve all heard people say “Well, that’s different because she’s family and he’s not.” But now think of the family of God, the Trinity. This mysterious, intimate relationship of God’s family has been opened through Christ to include us humans. We too are God’s family!

God has often revealed himself through human experiences. The entire Hebrew Scriptures are based on

the notion that God acts in history. Today, perhaps more than ever, we need to see this Triune God through the experience of the family. The family continues to be the first place we experience love, it is the best (or the worst) school of religion. I think we could say that your knowledge of God depends very much on your experience of family.

The Holy Trinity, like the family, is above all a mystery of love. In a family we meet all kinds and degrees of love: The love of friendship, of husband and wife, mother-love and father-love, love of brothers and sisters, and simple charity. And the fusion of all these loves we call the love of family.

In the same way the Holy Trinity is the complete expression of God’s Love. When a family is faithful, their love transforms itself into the image of the Holy Trinity on earth. The Holy Trinity, like the family, is above all a mystery of unity. Love is union. Two spouses who love one another are united, and two distinct persons who become one: “And the two shall become one flesh.” This unity and diversity of two-in-one helps us to understand the Trinity: Three in One, three distinct persons in a unity of love.

The Holy Trinity, like the family, is a mystery of fruitful love and unity. The man and woman who love each other participate in the creative power of God, in the Love that gives life. The child is the living image of the parents’ love, just as in the Trinity, where the Son is the perfect Image of God.

MAKING THE TRINITY REAL

If God is a Trinity of distinct persons, then God is relationship. To make it sound more real you can say that God is family. If that’s so, then you need to approach the mystery of the Holy Trinity with more than just your mind -- you need an open heart. To grasp more about the Trinity you have to be ready to receive God into your life, this God who is boundless, unconditional love.

God is family. We are all family. Think of that the next time you’re thinking ill of someone, especially someone who hates you. No matter who that person is, you have to say to yourself, “I better be real careful because after all that person is family.”

If your God's love has boundaries around it and is limited to only certain people, then that is not the Triune God of the Christian faith, but a God with boundaries. A god with boundaries is obviously not much of a God, but rather an idol.

Our belief in the Trinity, in God as Family, challenges us to open our hearts in love to all of creation. Sure we may fall short of this, but the Trinity is like that -- something we never quite get completely.

"We are family"

GETTING GOD RIGHT

.

Do you remember back in the days when you would hear people say things like "After this covid19 is over and we get back to normal...." or "I'll be glad when this is all finished and we can move on." I'm hearing expressions like that less and less often lately. Maybe people are beginning to realize that in many areas things are never going to simply return to the way they were before the pandemic. You can name more examples of these deep changes than I can.

 On Monday July 6 St. Benedict's Prep Division will begin its summer session with all classes being taught on line. Looking down the road to September, try to picture twenty-four kids in a single classroom all keeping six feet apart. (You're right: It can't be done.)  We along with everyone else are trying to imagine creative new ways of doing school. We have to come up with whole new ways of thinking about teachers, classrooms, student interaction and so on.

Even if and when there is a vaccine for covid19, the world will already be a different place in many ways, and our decisions are going to be based on factors that most of us haven't thought of yet.

THE RIGHT GOD

In the midst of all this flux and uncertainty we naturally long for some solid ground on which to stand. Many of us turn, of course, to our faith in God, a loving God who is above all of creation, who is infinite, beyond the boundaries of time and space.

But this means that it's more important than ever that we Christians begin the with the concept of God revealed to us by Jesus Christ rather than one based on human needs, emotions or logical theories. If you go to the column of "labels"  to the left of this screen and click on "God and Suffering" you'll get a good sense of what I mean by our faulty ideas about God. (The label list shows how preoccupied I've become with fighting against these terrible misunderstandings about God.) I won't repeat the ideas expressed in the most recent posts listed there, but would like to offer an idea or two.

Our understanding (or misunderstanding) of the true meaning of the crucifixion and death of Jesus will make all the difference in how we experience the sufferings caused by the present pandemic. Here is a quotation from Richard Rohr's book "The Universal Christ," page 143:

[Then] in the eleventh century Anselm of Canterbury wrote a paper called Cur Deus Homo? or "Why Did God Become A Human?" which, unfortunately, might just be the most successful piece of theology ever written. Thinking he could solve the problem of sin inside of the medieval code of feudal honor and shame, Anselm said, in effect, "Yes, a price did need to be paid to restore God's honor, and it needed to be paid to God the Father -- by one who was equally divine." Apparently, Anselm never thought out the disastrous implications of his theory, especially for people who were

Anselm of Canterbury
 (1033 - 1109)

already afraid or resentful of God. In authoritarian and patriarchal cultures, most people were fully programmed to think this way -- working to appease an authority figure who was angry, punitive, and even violent in his reactions. Many still operate this way, especially if they had an angry or abusive parent. People respond to this kind of God because it fits their own story line.

Unfortunately, for a simple but devastating reason, this understanding also nullifies any in-depth spiritual journey Why would you love or trust or desire to be with such a God? 

Over the next few centuries, Anselm's honor- and shame-based way of thinking came to be accepted among Christians. 143

If this is the God that we're dealing with, then the pandemic is easily understood, right? But who would ever want to spend all eternity in the presence of such an angry, self-centered, pitiless God? Not me, thanks!

Next time I'll remind us of Jesus' revelation about the God who is nothing but Love - someone you would look forward to being with for all eternity.