by Richard Rohr
Neither of these know how to know! We have sacrificed our unique telescope for a very inadequate microscope.
Divine knowing—some would call it spiritual intuition—is actually an allowing of someone else to know in us, through us, for us, and even as us. It demands what I often call an “identity transplant.”
This isn’t some New Age idea! Esteemed sixteenth-century teacher, Carmelite friar, and priest John of the Cross describes this Trinitarian transplant this way:
One should not think it impossible that the soul be capable of so sublime an activity as this breathing in God, through participation as God breathes in her. For, granted that God favors her by union with the Most Blessed Trinity, in which she becomes deiform and God through participation, how could it be incredible that she also understand, know, and love—or better that this be done in her—in the Trinity, together with it, as does the Trinity itself! Yet God accomplishes this in the soul through communication and participation. This is transformation in the three Persons in power and wisdom and love, and thus the soul is like God through this transformation. He created her in His image and likeness that she might attain such resemblance.37
Such knowing does not inflate the ego but beautifully humbles it, teaching us patience, because even a little bit of spiritual knowing goes a long way. Read Paul’s Sermo Sapientiae (Sermon on Wisdom) in 1 Corinthians 1:17–2:16 if you want to be exposed to a masterful attempt to describe this alternative way of knowing. It is, frankly, why the gifts of the Spirit distinguish between knowledge and wisdom,38 which most of us think are the same thing. Spiritual knowing is often called wisdom, and must be distinguished from merely having correct information or knowledge.
In other words, God (and uniquely the Trinity) cannot be known as we know any other object—such as a machine, an objective idea, or a tree—which we are able to “objectify.” We look at objects, and we judge them from a distance through our normal intelligence, parsing out their varying parts, separating this from that, presuming that to understand the parts is always to be able to understand the whole. But divine things can never be objectified in this way; they can only be “subjectified” by becoming one with them! When neither yourself nor the other is treated as a mere object, but both rest in an I-Thou of mutual admiration, you have spiritual knowing.39 Some of us call this contemplative knowing.
Such knowing intuits things in their wholeness, with all levels of connection and meaning, and perhaps how they fit in the full scheme of things. Thus, the contemplative response to the moment is always appreciation and inherent re-spect (“to look at a second time”) because I am now a part of what I am trying to see. Our first practical and partial observation of most things lacks this respect. It is not yet contemplative knowing. Frankly, when you see things contemplatively, everything in the universe is a mirror! How seriously I mean this will become clear as we proceed.
Now just hold on to this, dear readers, because the originating mystery of Trinity both names and begins the mirroring process, allowing us to know all that we need to know by the same endless process of mirroring and reflecting.40 We know things in their depth and beauty only by this second gaze of love.
Hold on to this central metaphor of mirroring as we move forward: a true mirror first receives an image and then reflects it back truthfully—but now so that I can see myself, too. The all-important thing is that you find the right mirror that mirrors you honestly and at depth. All personhood is created in this process, and our job is always to stay inside this mirroring. This is almost exactly what Heinz Kohut, the psychoanalyst, was saying with his “self psychology.”41 Here we are saying that the same is true theologically and spiritually; our task is to trustfully receive and then reflect back the inner image transmitted to us until, as the apostle Paul expressed, “we are gradually turned into the image that we reflect.”42
This is the whole spiritual journey in one sentence! All love, goodness, and holiness is a reflected gift. You take all things into yourself by gazing at them with reverence, and this completes the circuit of love—because this is how creation is looking out at you. The inner life of the Trinity has become the outer life of all creation. This is good!
This is all about expanding our recognition and reverence for the universal mystery of Incarnation (the enfleshment of the Divine) until, in the end, as Augustine shockingly puts it, “there shall be one Christ, loving Himself.”43 And of course, he is only building on Paul: “There is only Christ: he is everything and he is in everything.”44 The Christ is the universalization of what many of us first fell in love with in Jesus. But this deserves a whole other book,45 and I am jumping ahead of ourselves. But I do want you to know where this is all going—and where it came from. The divine mirroring will never stop; mirroring is how the whole transformation process is personally initiated and finally achieved.
But we have to be taught how to “gaze steadily into this law of perfect freedom, and make this our habit,” as James so brilliantly intuits it.46
Jesus comes forth from the infinite life of the Trinity and invites us and includes us back in the Infinitely Receiving Gaze so that now we can have participatory knowledge of the same,47 because no objectification of God is ever possible. We can only be mirrored, and we can only know and see ourselves fully both in a mirror and through a mirror. It is thus crucial and central to have a well-polished mirror that can see and reflect God in you. Yes, good theology and God-image are important!
And dare we believe that God sees a bit of Godself mirrored in new form as God gazes at us? This is a very fair conclusion.
Mirrored knowledge is not “logical” knowledge—it’s reflected and received knowledge. That’s why it’s difficult to prove God or to prove love to anybody who hasn’t been in the receiving line itself. In fact, it’s largely impossible. Note how Moses’ face shines after he’s received the divine gaze and been seen truthfully and lovingly,48 and yet he always covers it with a veil when he goes among the people. This is no small symbol. All people need to be seen for themselves and as themselves, and receive the divine gaze intimately—and not just rely on someone else’s seeing.
Three times, Scripture mentions that Moses was the only one who knew YHWH “face to face.”49 This is the first account of the divine unveiling in the biblical tradition, and it is done precisely through a process of personal interface, or mirroring. The image is effectively transferred to Moses, and then he spends the rest of his life trying to pass on the mirroring to the wandering Israelites—with scant success. People prefer laws and reassuring repetitive rituals to intimate mirroring. True mirroring only needs to be received and recognized once—and once is enough to change you forever. But it deepens if we “gaze steadily and make it a habit,” as James says. This is the heart of all prayer.
It is very hard to talk about spiritual things in a totally objective or external way. It’s very hard to talk about inner experience because, frankly, if you haven’t been there, you haven’t been there. If you don’t desire to mirror others, you probably haven’t been effectively mirrored yourself. And the Divine Mirror is what James calls “the perfect law of freedom”50 because it reflects us with a totally liberating love and acceptance. Perhaps one of the greatest weaknesses of institutional religion is that we’ve given people the impression that the pope could know for us, or the experts could know for us, or the Bible could know for us—that we could have second-hand knowledge of holy things, and could be really invested in the sacred because someone else told us it was true. God ended up being an outer “thing” and largely remained out there, extraneous to the experience of the soul, the heart, and even the transformed mind. Yet God has no grandchildren, only children.
Thus, we tried to know God through objectified knowledge, which finally became a boring facsimile of knowledge because we weren’t in on the deal; it was literally outside us and beyond us. This is much of organized religion.
Humans get excited
about something only if it includes them in some way. God surely knew this about us, and so God included us inside of God’s own knowing—by planting the Holy Spirit within us as the Inner Knower and Reminder of “all things.”51 This is indeed a re-minding, a very different kind of mind that is given to us!
But it gets even better: we know and accept ourselves in the very same movement in which we’re knowing and accepting God; in surrendering to God, we simultaneously accept our best and fullest self. What a payoff! What a truly holy exchange! And it’s all accomplished in the process of mirroring. On the psychological level, this is Heinz Kohut’s “recovery of the self.”52
The doctrine of Trinity says that it’s finally participatory knowledge that matters, not rational calculating, which is but one limited form of knowing. God—and the human person by an irreducibly important extension—must never be objectified. In fact, God refuses to be an object of our thinking. As John of the Cross so frequently insisted, God refuses to be known but can only be loved.53
Here is the sad tradeoff that most Western believers have settled for: science is allowed to give us the big field of objective and helpful knowledge, and religion is allowed to give us the smaller subjective field of personally meaningful wisdom. Cynthia Bourgeault, who teaches in our Living School at the Center for Action and Contemplation, rightly calls this “crazy-making.”54 We both agree it is at the heart of our anemic and split-mind Christianity, which mass-produces both fundamentalists and practical agnostics inside the church—and sincere atheists outside it. What a shame and what a loss. In fact, true spirituality should give us access to the bigger field, but it does not seem that most of our religions have risen above the tribal level up to now. Perhaps we have been lacking Trinity!
God can only be loved and enjoyed, which ironically ends up being its own new kind of knowing. This is absolutely central and pivotal.
Now, if the very nature of this God is a centrifugal force flowing outward that becomes a centripetal force drawing inward (similar to a rubber band, or as in mirroring), then we’d have every right to expect a family resemblance between ourselves and everything else. Trinity allows our scientific and spiritual cosmologies to finally operate as one, which we had best discover very quickly before the divide deepens or appears unbridgeable.
If a loving Creator started this whole thing, then there has to be a “DNA connection,” as it were, between the One who creates and what is created. One of the many wonderful things that scientists are discovering as they compare their observations through microscopes with those through telescopes is that the pattern of the neutrons, protons, and atoms is similar to the pattern of planets, stars, and galaxies: both are in orbit, and all is relational to everything else. We now know the same is true in biology, as Robert Lanza’s work on biocentrism so brilliantly demonstrates: “the universe is created by life and not the other way around.”55 Life-flow is the ground of everything, absolutely everything.
There is a similarity between the perceived two ends of the universe, the Divine and the human, just as we should have expected: “Let us create in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves” is how Genesis first described the Creator speaking.56 And the Hebrew even uses the plural pronouns for some wonderful reason.
The Jewish intuition was there from the beginning. They didn’t have scientific evidence for it yet; it was just simple interface with the world. Spiritual intuitions are almost always on some level correct. It’s what we want with them when we literalize them and make them wooden, mechanical, and fundamentalist that causes them to lose the flow, and the flow is exactly where the life is at.
What could have been a Divine Wave, we have for the most part related to as a static particle god.
This demotion made a whole bunch of Christian dogmas appear to be believing in magic—purely transactional and almost always for an exclusive few. Our “good news” was no longer catholic, or universal, truth but merely ethnic, cultural, and earthbound truth.
We have a lot of catching up to do.
The energy in the universe is not in the planets, or in the protons or neutrons, but in the relationship between them. Not in the particles but in the space between them. Not in the cells of organisms but in the way the cells feed and give feedback to one another. Not in any precise definition of the three persons of the Trinity as much as in the relationship between the Three! This is where all the power for infinite renewal is at work:
The loving relationship between them.
The infinite love between them.
The dance itself.
In other words, it is an entirely relational universe. If, at any time, we try to stop this flow moving through us, with us, and in us,57 we fall into the true state of sin—and it is truly a state more than a momentary behavior.
Sin is the state of being closed down, shut off, blocked, and thus resisting the eternal flow that we’re meant to be. By a hardened heart or a cold spirit, by holding another person apart in hatred, you’ve thus cut yourself off from the flow. Jesus therefore criticizes the religious leaders who want to condemn the woman caught in adultery much more than the woman herself. Jesus’ words to the murderous, religious bean counters in John 8 forever stand as a rather wholesale critique of all stone-throwing, and they locate sin where we would rather not see it.
The divine flow either flows both in and out, or it is not flowing at all. The Law of Flow is simple, and Jesus states it in many formulations, such as “Happy are the merciful; they shall have mercy shown to them.”58
Sin is always a refusal of mutuality and a closing down into separateness. In his classic The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis has the soul in hell shouting out, “I don’t want help. I want to be left alone.”59 Whenever we refuse mutuality toward anything…whenever we won’t allow our deep inner-connectedness to guide us…whenever we’re not attuned to both receiving and giving…you could say that the Holy Spirit is existentially absent from our lives. (Not essentially, however.)
This is indeed the “sin against the Holy Spirit” that “cannot be forgiven,”60 only because it does not look like one of those naughty things that needs forgiveness! And so we’d never think of even asking for forgiveness, smugly sitting over there in our self-complacent corner. True evil and true sin must be very well disguised to survive. Separation will normally not look like sin, but will often resemble propriety and even appropriate boundary-keeping. “I have a right to be upset!” the righteous soul says. No one ever “deserves” our kindness; in fact, what makes it kindness is that you are not even asking that silly question.
Vulnerability
Did you ever imagine that what we call “vulnerability” might just be the key to ongoing growth? In my experience, healthily vulnerable people use every occasion to expand, change, and grow. Yet it is a risky position to live undefended, in a kind of constant openness to the other—because it would mean others could sometimes actually wound you (from vulnus, “wound”). But only if we choose to take this risk antie also allow the exact opposite possibility: the other might also gift you, free you, and even love you.
But it is a felt risk every time.
Every time.
If and when we can live such a vulnerable life, without ceasing—the life we see mirrored in a God who is described as three persons perfectly handing over, emptying themselves out, and then fully receiving what has been handed over—there will always be a centrifugal force flowing through, out, and beyond us. Inside Trinity, a spiritual life simply becomes “the imitation of God,”61 as impossible as this sounds to our ordinary levels of abiding and awareness.
This, then, seems to be the work of the Spirit: to keep you growing is to keep you vulnerable to life and love itself. Notice that the major metaphors for the Spirit are always dynamic, energetic, and moving: elusive wind, descending dove, falling fire, and flowing water. Spirit-led people never stop growing and changing and recognizing the new moment of
opportunity. How strange to think that so much of religion became a worship of the status quo, until you remember that the one thing the ego hates and fears more than anything else is change.
What, then, is the path to holiness? It’s the same as the path to wholeness. And we are never “there” yet. We are always just in the river.
Don’t try to push the river or make the river happen; it is already happening, and you cannot stop it. All you can antis recognize it, enjoy it, and ever more fully allow it to carry you.
This is the great surprise, and for some a disappointment: this divine flow has very little to do with you.
As the late Irish poet and priest John O’Donohue put it:
I would love to live
Like a river flows,
Carried by the surprise
Of its own unfolding.62
The flow doesn’t have to do with you being perfect. It doesn’t have to do with you being right. Nor is it ever about belonging to the right group. You do not even have to understand it. How could you? You have surely noticed that Jesus never has any such checklist test before he heals anybody. He just says, as it were, “Are you going to allow yourself to be touched? If so, let’s go!”
The touchable ones are the healed ones; it’s pretty much that simple. There’s no doctrinal test. There’s no moral test. There is no checking out if they are Jewish, gay, baptized, or in their first marriage. There’s only the one question:
Do you want to be healed?
If the answer is a vulnerable, trusting, or confident one, the flow always happens, and the person is healed. Try to disprove me on that!
And believe it or not, it’s much harder to allow this touch and to surrender to this flow than it is to have a strong moral stance on this or that, or to believe doctrines about this, that, or the other, which is surely why the unconverted person falls to these lower levels instead of just staying trustfully in the always-vulnerable river of life.