by Richard Rohr
Creative Continuation
Daniel Walsh, who was Merton’s primary philosophy teacher, says he’s not sure if the human person can even legitimately be called a creation, because we are a continuance, an emanation from, a subsistent relation with what we call Trinity.91 We are in continuity with God somehow, and not a separate creation. We are “chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world,” as Ephesians puts it.92
Mature Christianity is thus an invitation to share in the personal life of God, a dynamic of generated love forever continued in space and time through God’s creatures.
Thus, God’s self-knowledge includes knowledge of us, and God’s self-love includes love of us.
They are the same knowing, the same loving, and the same freedom.
Yes, in some sense we become an “other” that can be seen as a separate object from God, but from God’s side we are always known and loved subject to subject, just as the persons of the Trinity know and love one another. God and the human person must know (and can know) one another center to center, subject to subject—and never subject to object.
This is the perhaps the clearest way to describe God’s unconditional acceptance of us, forgiveness of our mistakes, and mercy toward us in all circumstances:
We are never an object to God. God cannot but love God’s image in us.
So a fully Christian theology and philosophy of the human person must say that human personhood originates in the divine Logos, the eternal Christ, as imitations and reflections of God’s relationship to Godself. We are constituted by the same relationship that exists between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit!
“The end for which the human person is created is to manifest the Truth of Christ in the love God has for himself in his Divine Trinity,” Daniel Walsh says in his lectures to the monks. This is the theology of personhood upon ihich Thomas Merton builds his monumental worldview, and which we can, too.
Divine Personhood and human personhood are reciprocal, mutually-mirroring concepts. God’s nature as relationship creates ours, and ours is constituted by this same bond, which is infinite openness and capacity to love.
We must know that we are in fact objectively loveable to really be able to love ourselves. That is what Divine Personhood assures and guarantees. Your false self is not ready for unconditional love. Love and respect, yes. But not unconditional love—only conditional love.
This becomes Merton’s foundation for what he calls the True Self, which is always, objectively, and forever completely loveable—all ephemera notwithstanding. I believe this was supposed to be the foundational good news of the gospel, the rock of salvation—a basis for human personhood that does not vacillate and cannot fail. Jesus is announcing with his words and exemplifying with his Table and teaching alike that human persons are created inside of the substantial and infinite love of the Trinity. You cannot “get” to such a place; you can only rest and rejoice in such a place.
Paradigms Lost
So God is not first of all a “being” that loftily decides to love good people and punish bad people; instead, Absolute Love stands revealed as the very name and shape of Being itself. Love constitutes the very nature of being, as opposed to a seemingly demanding and whimsical being occasionally deciding to love or not to love, which gives the human psyche a very fragile and shaky foundation.
Trinity is the ultimate paradigm shift; it was supposed to come standard-installed in the Christian revelation. Again, it should have changed everything, but it didn’t. The doctrine of the Trinity was largely shelved as an embarrassing abstraction—even by most preachers, teachers, and theologians. God was diminished, and we all lost out. Jesus alone was forced to carry the entire drama of liberation, which he could do, it seems; but there was always a much bigger foundation, frame, dynamic, and energy missing from the salvation equation.
Here’s how Julian of Norwich experienced this reality, all the way back in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England:
The Trinity suddenly filled my heart with the greatest joy. And I understood that in heaven it will be like that for ever for those who come there. For the Trinity is God, God is the Trinity; the Trinity is our maker and protector, the Trinity is our dear friend for ever, our everlasting joy and bliss, through our Lord Jesus Christ. And this was shown in the first revelation, and in all of them; for it seems to me that where Jesus is spoken of, the Holy Trinity is to be understood.93
We cannot separate Jesus from the Trinity. Yet the average person in the pews never had a chance to enjoy the much bigger economy of grace. We swam around in a small pool called scarcity, which is now evident in most of our stingy, hoarding politics and economics.
Even our old catechisms said that the “theological virtues” of faith, hope, and love, which were said to be the nature of Divine Being, were offered to us as “a sharing in the very life of God.” These, it was argued in the medieval church, were not first of all gifts to individuals but gifts to society, history, and humanity as a whole.94
This is prefigured in two great thinkers in the Church, Augustine and Aquinas, who argued that the virtue of hope applies first of all to the collective before the individual.
Yet we tried to generate hope in the isolated individual, while leaving him and her adrift in a cosmos, society, and humanity that was heading toward hopelessness and punishment.
It is very hard for individuals to enjoy faith, hope, and love, or even to preach faith, hope, and love—which alone last95—unless society itself first enjoys faith, hope, and love in some collective way. This is much of our problem today; we have not given the world any message of cosmic hope, but only threatening messages of Apocalypse and Armageddon.
God as Trinity gives hope to society as a whole, because it is based on the very nature of existence itself and not on the up-and-down behaviors of individuals, which are always unstable. Stay with me here, and I think this problem and its answer will become obvious.
Nevertheless, let’s first turn to the example of children to assess this individual virtue of hope, since we have to begin with our own humanity. Marketing experts say children (and dogs) are even more effective than sex in advertising. Why? Because children and dogs are still filled with a natural hope and expectation that their smile will be returned. They tend to make direct eye contact, looking right into you, just grinning away (unless, of course, they have been abused).
This is pure being.
This is uninhibited flow.
Surely, this is why Jesus told us to be like children. There is nothing stopping the pure flow in a child or a dog, and that’s why any of us who have an ounce of eros, humanity, or love in us are defenseless against such unguarded presence.
You can only with great effort resist kissing a wide-eyed baby or petting an earnest dog. You want to pull them to yourself with love because they are, for a moment—forgive me—“God”!
Or is it the other way around? Is it you who have become “God” by standing in such an unresisted flow?
Both are true, of course. We see this flow in the attraction of all beauty, in all admiring, in all ecstasy, in all solidarity with any suffering. Anyone who fully allows the flow will see the divine image even in places that have become ugly or undone. This is the universal seeing of the Trinity.
“Anyone who lives in love lives in God, and God lives in him.”96
If I had said that independently of St. John, many would have called me a lightweight New Ager from California, but I simply share John’s deeply Trinitarian spirituality—in all its implications. This is true Traditionalism.
What Trinity is saying, sisters and brothers, is that God, as I expressed earlier, is actually inter-being, which many Buddhists are freer to say than we are. What irony! Yet we know truth is one, so it should not surprise or disappoint us. We were the ones who should have been taught via Trinity that God was not a being, surely not an isolated anything—whic
h, of course, implies that all creatures proceeding from such a Source are inter-beings, also.
This shines light on our fascination with sexuality, with all things beautiful, with nature, with animals, with music and art; we are naturally drawn to lovely things outside and beyond ourselves, and we want to rush toward them and unite with them in almost any way—some ways that work and some that frankly don’t (which we might call addictive behavior or “sin”).
Henceforth, you can know and love God on at least three distinctly ionderful levels: the Transpersonal level (“Father”), the Personal level (“Jesus”), and the Impersonal level (“Holy Spirit”). If you are interested, this rather perfectly corresponds to what Ken Wilber and others call “the One Two Three of God.”97
Once you look out at reality from inside the Trinity, you can and will know, love, and serve God in all that you do. The metaphors, rituals, and doctrines of other religions are no longer threatening to you, but often very helpful. God as Trinity makes competitive religious thinking largely a waste of time. But only mystics seem to know that the only possible language by which we can talk about God is metaphorical.
Distinct Union
So let’s talk more about the Three.
There’s a perfect balancing in the Trinity that protects personal identity and total oneness at the same time. We are told that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (to again use the classic names) each have their uniqueness, and yet they create a deeper and more solid oneness by surrendering it lovingly to one another. (The parallel to authentic sexual encounter is striking.)
And let me say right up front, don’t waste too much time trying to argue about the gender of the Three; the male names ascribed to two of them and the common feminine attribution to the Holy Spirit are in great part arbitrary—to the underlying Mystery. What the early theologians overwhelmingly agreed on is that what mattered was the relationships between them (a technical term being “the subsistent relations”) and not the individual names or genders of the Three. In Scripture, the Creator is referred to as a rock98 and as a nursing mother;99 Jesus is referred to as wisdom100 and as a mother hen;101 the Holy Spirit is depicted as breath,102 ruah in Hebrew, which is feminine,103 and is also called Comforter, or Paraclete in Greek,104 which is beyond gender altogether.105 Consider all of these images—as well as others, such as flaming fire106 and apparently even “wild dog”!107 This is exactly ihat we’d expect to find in relation to a God in whom male and female are said to reflect something genuine of the divine image and likeness. Clearly, our triune God is a riot of expression, transcending and including any possible labels.
The all-important thing is that the Three are formed and identified by the outpouring and uninhibited flow itself. The flow forms and protects the Three, and the Three distribute the flow. It’s precisely this same dynamic for a healthy society, isn’t it?
But we tend to dwell in extremes. In much of the West today, it’s either intense individualism (in both its progressive and conservative forms)—making the common good a lost and impossible ideal; or people live in mindless collectives, tribalism, and groupthink—where too many people lack any healthy autonomy or personal individuation (again in both progressive and conservative formats, which shows us this common way of seeing offers us two bogus criteria for truth).
So how can we preserve deep and true values across the spectrum? This is invariably the question. Honestly, without trying to be esoteric, the Trinity gives us a rather ideal paradigm, model, and invitation. A way through that could be applied to so many problematic and political issues.108 Let’s again try.
The word person as we use it today, meaning a separate human individual, is not really found in the Hebrew Bible. But the idea of “face” is. Hebrew authors wanted to convey the effect of “interface” with their YHWH God who sought to intimately communicate with them: “May God let his face shine upon you, and may his face give you peace.”109 This same usage is found in several psalms,110 where it is often translated as presence, meaning more precisely communicated presence—a transference of selfhood from one to another.
In the Greek translations of the Bible that we have, the noun used for “face” was prosopon, literally referring to the stage masks that Greek actors wore. This seemed to serve as both an enlarged identity and a megaphone. Teachers like Tertullian and the Cappadocian Fathers used similar language, in Latin persona, preserving the full freedom and identity of ihat were eventually called the three “persons” of the Trinity—who are nevertheless a perfect and total communion.
Each member of the Trinity was considered a persona, or “face,” of God. Each person of the Trinity fully communicated its face and goodness to the other, while fully maintaining its own facial identity within itself. Each person of the Trinity “sounded through” (per sonare) the other.
Ironically, person is now our word for the autonomous human being, but originally it meant almost exactly the opposite. Each of the Three knew they were soundings-through from the other two. Identity was both maintained and fully shared, which frankly is what makes any mature love possible. Every good psychologist would agree.
We are each a sounding-through of something much more and even of Someone Else, and that becomes our self. Yet we are a stage mask, a face, receiving and also revealing our shared DNA, our ancestors, and our past culture. This has formed our very understanding of what we now call a “person.” Again, ironically, what first implied that all identity was shared now means the exact opposite—a separate individual is now called a “person,” and we do not commonly honor the fact that we are all “soundings-through”! This simple distortion has made the first Catholic moral principle of “the common good” almost an impossible ideal.
Think of your own experience: how many people do you know, including yourself, who are really in this divine dance with an appropriate and balanced degree of self-love and self-giving? It is the very definition of psychological maturity. And it is indeed a dance, where we all make a lot of missteps.
Insofar as an appropriate degree of self-love is received, held, enjoyed, trusted, and participated in, this is the same degree to which it can be given away to the rest of the world. You can and you must “love your neighbor as you love yourself”—for your own wholeness and theirs.
The Golden Rule is also the gold standard for all growth and development. We learned it from the Trinity.
This is the never-ending dance: the movement in and out, of receiving and handing on.
And remember, if it’s not flowing out of you, it’s probably because you’re not allowing it to flow toward you. And love can flow toward you in every moment: through the image in a flower, in a grain of sand, in a wisp of cloud, in any one person whom you allow to delight you. It’s why you begin to find yourself smiling at things for no apparent reason.
Tide Boxes at Kmart
One time, I was in the detergent aisle at my local Kmart in Albuquerque. I know, this story is starting out promising, right? Stay with me!
I was the only one in that aisle—thankfully—and I found myself just standing there, smiling at the Tide boxes.
I’m not sure how long I was doing this, but it was a solid few minutes, I suspect. Eventually, I recovered and looked both ways, grateful that no one was watching, because I was a little embarrassed by my silly smile. Such causeless grinners are usually unstable people, aren’t they? I knew that, normally, Tide boxes are not great causes of joy in and of themselves.
Or are they? Should Proctor and Gamble hire me?
Spiritual joy has nothing to do with anything “going right.” It has everything to do with things going, and going on within you. It’s an inherent, inner aliveness. Joy is almost entirely an inside job. Joy is not first determined by the object enjoyed as much as by the prepared eye of the enjoyer.
And when the flow is flowing, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing. You don’t have to be a priest on the altar or
a preacher in a pulpit, that’s for sure. (I can hear the palpable relief all the way over here from this keyboard. You’re welcome.)
You can be a homemaker in a grocery store or a construction worker at a work site; it doesn’t matter. It’s all inherently sacred and deeply satisfying. As the nineteenth-century poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning put it, “Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God.”111
All is whole and holy in the very seeing, because you are standing inside the One Flow of Love without the negative pushback of doubting.112
This is all that there really is. Call it Consciousness, call it God, call it Love; this is the Ground of all Being out of which all things—and especially all good things—come.113
It’s an allowing; it’s a deep seeing; it’s an enjoying. It is the Creative Force of the universe. The river is already flowing, and you are in it whether you are enjoying it or not.
So what is your “flow” right now?
Are you sucking in or flowing out?
Are you defending or opening up?
Is it negative energy or life energy that controls this day?
Are you over-defensive, or can you be vulnerable before the next moment?
These are two utterly different directions and energies, and you must learn to tell the difference within yourself. Otherwise, you will not know what to pray for, what you actually need, and who you really are in any one moment.114
All of your raw material for right-seeing is within you—because in the Holy Spirit you have your inner “Advocate” and “Defense Attorney.”115 The Spirit is your implanted placeholder who teaches you how to pray, how to hope, and how to love. As Paul so honestly says, “We do not know how to pray.”116
You just have to let go of whatever it is within you that is saying no to the flow, judging it as impossible, or of any shame that is keeping the Indwelling Spirit from guiding you, because guess what? Even your sins often become your best teachers. The Great Flow makes use of everything, absolutely everything. Even your mistakes will be used in your favor, if you allow them to be. That’s how good God is.