by Richard Rohr
Loving All the Wrong People
“Only we have the Spirit.”
I was taught this in my church growing up; and then I found that every religion says the same thing. Isn’t that interesting?
There’s a phrase for this; it’s called group narcissism. It has nothing to do with love for God; it isn’t a search for truth or love. It’s a grasping for control, and every group at its less mature stages of development will try to put God into the pocket of its own members-only jackets!
Why do I say something so unequivocal? Because I dare you to find a world religion that doesn’t do this. But we don’t need to look any further than our own Old Testament. Here are some prevalent religious mind-sets from those times that were carried over into Jesus’ first-century world—and how Jesus responds to them.
“God ignores the Samaritans.”
The Samaritans, living in proximity to the Jewish people, were considered a mixed race with “mixed” religion, and were therefore not to be associated with, as John’s gospel explains matter-of-factly: “Jews, of course, do not associate with Samaritans” (John 4:9). But then Jesus tells a parable praising the extraordinary kindness of a Samaritan (see Luke 10:25–37); another time, when he travels through Samaria, he surprises a Samaritan woman—as well as his own disciples—by talking to her directly, engaging her in a conversation about deep spiritual matters. (See John 4:4–42.) Jesus also displays God’s favor toward Samaritans in other ways. (See, for example, Luke 9:52–56; 17:11–19.)
“God does not know that the Syrophoenicians even exist.”
The Syrophoenicians, living north of Israel, were considered outsiders and pagans. But a Syrophoenician woman, desperate for her daughter to be healed, appeals to Jesus, who praises her for her great faith and heals her daughter. (See Mark 7:24–30; Matthew 15:22–28.)
“We are the chosen people—to the exclusion of all other peoples.”
While affirming God’s unique relationship with Israel, Jesus demonstrates God’s grace toward and inclusion of people of all backgrounds—something his disciples and the crowds didn’t expect. When Jesus’ disciples finally came to understand his purpose, they did the same. They saw that all peoples—whether Jews, Jewish proselytes, or other “Gentiles” or “foreigners”—could enter the circle dance of the Trinity and experience the Spirit poured out upon them. (See, for example, Acts 2:1–11; 10:1–49.)
Jesus messes everything up! What does he do? He consistently makes the outsider the heroes of his parables and the recipients of God’s multifaceted grace. To not recognize and learn from this is culpable ignorance at this point.
By and large, we didn’t get it. Catholicism replicated almost down to fine detail the ritual and legalistic mistakes of Judaism, and Protestantism has imitated us quite well, while trying to cover their tracks by just getting legalistic about very different issues. But it is the same ego game.
And one could easily argue that our fellow Abrahamic path, Islam, has followed suit in mirroring our most egregious members-only behavior. Because that’s where immature religion always finds itself; it isn’t first of all a search for Holy Mystery and how to love. Most early religion is a search for the egoic self, a search for the moral high ground, and certainly for being better than those other people over there.
To draw from Karl Rahner again, he suggested that for fifty years we should all basically stop using the word God. Because, he says, we normally don’t have a clue what we are talking about! This becomes quite evident when we see what we have done with Jesus himself, who was given as the fully visible and obvious manifestation—and we still used him for our small culture wars. We still pulled him inside of our smaller psyche and out of the protective silence of the Trinity. We pretended we understood him perfectly whenever we could interpret him for our own wars, prejudices, and dominations. Poor Jesus.
So let’s just be humble and call God “the Holy Mystery” for fifty years, to cauterize the wound we’ve inflicted on our culture and ourselves. And maybe, as Rahner suggested, after half a century, we can get the language clarified and a little more humble, deferring to this Holy Mystery in grateful recognition that we’re not in charge of very much and we understand very little.
Emptiness Alone Is Prepared for Fullness
To make the above subhead real, let me quote from one of the earliest hymns of the church:
His state was divine
yet he did not cling
to his equality with God
but emptied himself.117
Could this first stanza of the great Philippian hymn, in its fullness, be applied not only to Jesus but also perhaps to the entire Trinity? I believe so.
The Three all live as an eternal and generous self-emptying, the Greek word being kenosis.
If you’re protecting yourself, if you’re securing your own image and identity, then you’re still holding on. Your ego remains full of itself. The opposite of kenosis.
The intriguing thing about the mutuality of the Trinity is that the names—the roles—the energies—are really interchangeable.
We don’t want to typecast the Father as the only infinite one, the Son as the only imminent one, or the Spirit as the only intimate one! All is absolutely given to the other and let go of; but for the sake of our mind, it’s helpful to identify three persons.
When all three of those divine qualities start drawing you, and when you’re at home with Infinity, Imminence, and Intimacy—all Three—I think you’re finally living inside a full Trinitarian spirituality.
This is God’s lifetime, lifelong work in you.
I hope this does not surprise or disappoint you, but I have often noticed these divine qualities in people who are marginalized, oppressed, “poor,” or “mentally disabled”—more than in many others.
They have to trust love. They need communion. They know that only the vulnerable people understand them. They profit from mutuality. They’re always in relationship. They find little ways to serve their community, to serve the sick, to serve those poorer than themselves. They know that only a suffering God can save them.
You can take such a pattern as the infallible sign that one lives in God. People filled with the flow will always move away from any need to protect their own power and will be drawn to the powerless, the edge, the bottom, the plain, and the simple. They have all the power they need—and it always overflows, and like water seeks the lowest crevices to fill.
The Space Between
Sometimes, people try to over-define the Trinity. “This is the work of the Father,” they say, confidently. “This is the role of the Son. And this is what the Spirit looks like.” In attempting to parse out and diagram the persons of Trinity, something vital is lost: the space between them.
The inner life of Godhead—this is a mystery that stretches language to its breaking point. The specific functions or roles of each person can be interesting to ponder, but frankly I don’t think this is the important point. Even the three names are largely “placeholders,” and a thousand beautiful names for God can be interchanged with each of them, as I do with names for the Holy Spirit in the appendix to this book, and as we have always done with both Christ and Jesus.
The all-important thing is to get the energy and quality of the relationship between these Three—that’s the essential mystery that transforms us.
Finally, it’s something you can experience only by resting inside of the relationships (prayer?), as when the disciples asked Jesus where he lived, and he offered this intimate invite: “Come and see.”118 Divine hospitality at work.
For years, the metaphor I’ve used for this is something most parents can readily relate to. When your little ones are getting ready to sleep, you can make the most comfortable bed and bassinette for them that you want, but will they stay there? No! Every excuse they can, they’re going to crawl in bed between the two of you, aren’t they?
And I’m sure you love it. Maybe not every night, but at least sometimes, before they start digging their heels into your neck!
Why do children like to crawl in your bed like this?
Because that’s where all the energy is!
All the safety and tenderness that they want!
Between the two of you.
They’ve got the best of both of you; they literally rest in the space, the relationship, between you. What child wouldn’t want to snuggle in bed sleeping between mom and dad?
It must be nirvana! It must be heaven! It must be total security; they can just reach out throughout the night and feel both of you on each side. Whereas each parent represents a certain kind of energy that might otherwise be entrenched on its own, the introduction of a third—the child—adds something truly novel to the mix. Some spiritual students call this “the Law of Three” and say it’s how all true change takes place.
How the Law of Three Changes Everything
Think about it: It’s election season, and you feel passionate about your favorite political candidate. You represent “first force” in the Law of Three—you’re in your candidate’s corner. Your co-worker—or maybe your parent—backs the other candidate of the other political party with equal passion. They represent “second force.”
The way we live so much of our lives stops right there. Someone takes position A, and someone else opposes them in Position B; they exist in rivalry and antagonism, world without end. 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 with earnestness, while fully awaiting some third force to arrive and surprise us all out of our neat little boxes. Note that this isn’t some mere synthesis of you and your co-worker’s opposition, but something genuinely novel arriving on the scene, a Position C.
It could be a viable third-party candidate that captures imaginations; it could be an upset within one of your political parties. It might be something on the outside that’s “bad,” like a storm or a natural disaster, which brings your community together in an unprecedented way. It could be an entirely non-“political” solution that presents itself with such urgency and vitality that everyone forgets—even if for only a season—what they were arguing about.
The exact form third force takes is beside the point, nor is it that first and second force suddenly find themselves invalidated in the face of some newer, shinier debut. Instead, it’s that this third force redeems each position and gives everyone a valuable role to play in the creation of something genuinely new—a fourth possibility that becomes the new field of our collective arising.
As I once spent an entire book offering to anyone with ears to hear, everything belongs.
This is what we can expect to not just believe as an idea, but experience in practice. If we embrace the life of Trinity at work in all creation, we sit invited at Rublev’s lovely round table:
The magic of three breaks us out of our dualistic impasses, and always invites a fourth world for us to enter into.119
Is the Trinity a Boy or a Girl?
“Father” and “Son” are obviously very masculine names for members of the Trinity, and even “Holy Spirit” is often envisioned in masculine terms. As the past two hundred years has led to a recovery of the full dignity and worth of women, both in the culture at large and in the church, many wonder why our language about God is so masculine-heavy.
Here’s how I’ve attempted to resolve this in my own inner devotional life: I have accepted that thousands of years of agrarian, Paleolithic, Fertile Crescent, patriarchal, and finally imperial inertia influenced the appearance of largely masculine names for God.120
But you know what I believe? I think the spaces in between the members of the Trinity are unmistakably feminine. The forms or manifestations strike me as the masculine dimension, and the diffused, intuitive, mysterious, and wonderful unconscious in-between, that’s the feminine. And that’s where the essential power is—the space between the persons more than the persons individually.
That said, I think we’ve done a very good thing in recent years giving the feminine nature of God her due in our biblical studies, our theology, and our worship. Our witness to the divine feminine in worship is particularly important, so people don’t come away with a picture of God as irreducibly masculine.121
But precisely what this mystery of Trinity does for me is give me a way to be true to both of these witnesses to the feminine in God. It’s okay if you want to keep the persons of God in their traditional masculine language—you don’t have to, but it works as long as you start unpackaging, proclaiming, teaching, and understanding the spaces in between, the relationships, the movement of the dance itself between the three persons, which for me is the underlying feminine dimension of God.
This is where the generativity seems to happen—where Hildegard’s veriditas, or new life, seems to happen. As the scientific principle of William of Ockham’s “Razor” suggests (one of our lesser-known Franciscan luminaries), the truest answer will usually be both simple and elegant; I find simplicity and elegance in this explanation. So take it into your prayer; walk inside of this masculine/feminine polarity and dance and see if you’re not renewed. History up to now has very seldom found the lovely balance.
The Power of Concentric Circles
What if we actually dropped into this flow and let it be our major teacher? Even our very notion of society, politics, and authority iould utterly change, because most of it is still top down and outside in.
It’s no surprise that the Western political notion of the divine right of kings held for so many centuries. We still observe that most people are utterly fascinated by other people they think are “important” or “powerful,” whether athletes, politicians, spiritual leaders, or celebrities. It is as if they have mana, a unique power or energy flowing from “out there” or “up there”—instead of in here. Most people live in fascination of and deep codependency on their own form of cargo cult. The power is always out there and up there. I don’t think we iould operate in this out-of-body way if we were in vital connection with the Trinity and the indwelling Spirit.
Trinitarian theology says that true power is circular or spiral, not so much hierarchical.
It’s here; it’s within us. It’s shared and shareable; it’s already entirely for you (see Romans 5:5 and all over the place!). God’s Spirit is planted within you and operating as you! Don’t keep looking to the top of the pyramid. 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. YHWH already tried to teach such servanthood to Israel in the four “servant songs” in order to train
them in being “light to all nations,”122 but their history predicted what Christianity repeated: we both preferred kings and empires instead of any suffering servanthood.
Power, according to the Jesus of the Trinity, is not something to be “grasped at.”123 I, Richard, don’t need to cling to my title, my uniform, my authorship, or whatever other trappings I use to make myself feel powerful and important. Waking up inside the Trinitarian dance, I realize that all of this is rather unimportant, in fact often pretense and show that keep me from my True Self. It just gets in the way of honesty and vulnerability and community. We all already have our power (dynamis) within us and between us—in fact, Jesus assures us that we are “clothed” in it!124
It seems to me that the only people who can handle power are those who don’t need it too much, those who can equally let go of it and share it. In fact, I’d say that at this difficult moment in history, the only people who can handle power are those who have made journeys through powerlessness. Most others seem to abuse it, according to the received wisdom of universally practiced male initiation rites.125
“Uninitiated” males who too easily acquire power invariably use it for their own purposes of advancement, and seldom for the common good. This hardly needs proof anymore—only love can handle power well. Trinity, the primal and ultimate Sourcer, begins creation by releasing that which empowers everything else: “Let there be light”!126
Light is not really what you see; it is that by which you see everything else. God is the Great Empowerer, taking the forms of inherent grace and constant evolution. Trinity is so humble that it does not seem to care who gets the credit. Like light, you do not see God; but God allows you to see everything else through really good eyes.