TRINITY - THE LOST PERSPECTIVE

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I've read Richard Rohr's  The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation four times; on this weekend of Trinity Sunday I want to re-publish some thoughts about the Trinity, but from the perspective of someone cooped up at home and who is practicing social distancing. Instead of thinking of God as an outside observer watching me trying to cope with the devastation cause by Covid-19, suppose I think of God as someone who is living each moment with me, who is deeply and personally involved with my struggles, sharing the ups and downs, the trials and the joys with me at every moment. This different perspective has a name: "The Holy Trinity." 

Some of the greatest difficulties that people (both believers and non-believers) have with Christianity are avoided if 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 our 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 certain of Rohr's pages to let my mind adjust to the new perspective. And each time I read one of his short chapters, the new perspective makes more and more sense. "The Divine Dance" is especially worth reflecting on during the present unprecedented pandemic experience.

Here's a summary of some of the main points of Fr. Rohr's thesis, 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 the 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

A while back I was sitting in on a class of seniors as they studied Homer's Odyssey. I was startled to hear a student reading from Homer that one of the warriors prayed to "Father Zeus." I suddenly saw 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; notice that 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. The Divine Dance sounds like a more Christlike perspective from which to experience the pandemic than the more common view that a distant, angry God must be punishing us or teaching us a harsh lesson.

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 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. 

Want to join the dance?

On Trinity Sunday during the days of pandemic and divisiveness in our civil life, we might pray that one day soon 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 all to become part of the Divine Dance.