by Richard Rohr
First of all, the very ritual says that we can know something in our body—that our body has to be reminded in whose “name” it lives and moves and has its being.146 Some call this “kinesthetic knowing” or even muscle memory. In the centuries and cultures before most people could read or write, this was undoubtedly how most people knew reality on a cellular, bodily level.
But let’s look at the movement, starting with the head—which is, I think, an unfortunate place to begin, but also notice that we move away from it. The name of the Father is the starting place.
And then we pull our hand to our belly, down across our heart and chest. …and of the Son encompasses creation—the physical, the seemingly “lower” material world.
And then we cross this line with the entire world of variety and differentiation from shoulder to shoulder, with…and of the Holy Spirit.
The meaning of this embodied gesture is actually quite clear and precise. I now exist under and within a new name—not my Richard name, but my Trinitarian identity. I am marked and signed, indeed!
We stand inside of this wholeness. It really is a marvelous piece of body prayer. Again, if you’re not from a tradition that makes this sign, try it. If you’re used to doing it in a mindless and perfunctory way, try letting the rote go and breathe through it each step of the way, as I’ve just shared it. Trinitarian theology has great power to move you out of the head and into the flow, and that is better experienced in our bodies and hearts.
Let me give you another illustration of this. Around the year 2000, near the final days of my Lenten hermitage, and after almost forty days of solitude, the inner flow, happiness, and aliveness became very rich and real for me. I felt like I was being perpetually healed and expanded. I recalled a lesser-known poem of the nineteenth-century priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. In “The Golden Echo,” he writes:
Deliver it, early now, long before death,
Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty’s self and beauty’s giver.147
And in another place:
This, all this beauty blooming,
This, all this freshness fuming,
Give God while worth consuming.148
I knew Hopkins was almost perfectly naming my own experience, as should be expected if we were both inhabited by the same wondrous flow. And each remaining morning and evening, I took a long walk down a steep hill and then back up again—but now backward, so I could gaze out with delight at the expansive desert valley in front of me, the various cacti covered with spring flowers. I learned to set my breath to the words of the poem: “beauty” on the exhalation and “back” on the inhalation, occasionally stopping to recite these verses in their entirety. I did not go to Eucharistic communion most of that Lent; I instead learned to live in communion most of the hours of the day, which I think is the goal of any true sacrament or practice.
This doesn’t take a lot of thinking. It doesn’t take a lot of theology. It doesn’t take a lot of education. It’s doesn’t even take a lot of morality.
You just have to walk and breathe and receive and give, and—voilà!—you’re in the flow. And this cannot be done by just thinking about it.
It’s like you’re in on the secret of the universe, and yet you can’t prove it to anybody, just as I’m likely not “proving” anything to you right now. Even so, stepping into this flow is enough to satisfy you forever. It’s enough to make you content with the rest of your life. It’s enough to know you really are okay and the world is okay, too. This is what it means to be captured by the Triune flow.
John of the Cross speaks of being awakened by the same delight, caught in the same great being, and breathing the same air as Jesus.149
We can enjoy the same thing that Jesus enjoyed. Why not?
The Many Belong in the One
Remember that ancient philosophical conundrum we discussed earlier, “the one and the many”?
Most of us don’t know how to be diverse and yet one. In unhealthy religion, we’ve felt this pathological need to make everybody the same; church has become more and more an exclusionary institution instead of this great banquet feast ihere Jesus constantly invites in “sinners,” outcasts, the marginalized, and the ne’er-do-wells.
Jesus says, in effect, “Go out to the highways and the byways—bring everybody in, good and bad alike.”
Check it out. Matthew 22. I didn’t make that up, all right? It’s from Jesus!150
But we don’t like that, do ie?
We don’t want “those people” in here with us. Maybe send some money or some missionaries “over there” to them, but please don’t bring them here, with us!
However, our little culture has defined the “bad people” as those others, because the ego is much more comfortable with uniformity. People who look like me and talk like me don’t threaten my boundaries.
What a contrast to the Trinitarian God who totally releases all claims on such boundaries for the sake of the other! Each member accepts that they’re fully accepted by the other.
This might well be the essence of the spiritual journey for all of us—to accept that we’re accepted and to go and live likewise. But we can’t do this because we’re living out of self-accusation—self-flagellation, in many cases. We’re so convinced that we’re not the body of Christ, that we’re unworthy, that we’re disconnected; thus, we’ve been anesthetized to the good news that the question of union has been resolved once and for all.
You cannot create your union with God; it is objectively already given to you. The only difference between people are those who are consciously drawing upon this union and those who are not.
Let me repeat: The difference is not between those who are united to God and those who aren’t. After all, as the psalmist asked,
Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.151
We’re all united to God, but only some of us know it. Most of us deny it and doubt it.
It’s just—frankly—too good to be true. That’s why they call it good news. But it can’t be this good, can it? Yeah, that’s ihere it gets its name and reputation as good news.
Here’s a deeper cut on why we’re so resistant: to accept that you are accepted is ironically experienced in the first moment (take my word on this) as a loss of power!
The ego wants to be self-made, not other-made, which is our whole problem with grace. If grace is true, dear reader, and if we’re all saved by the mercy of God, then why do we constantly try to create certain cutoff points?
We project onto God our way of loving. Our love is determined by the supposed worthiness of a given person: she’s pretty; he’s nice. I, in my magnanimity, will decide to love you because you’re so pretty or so nice.
Of course, this has little to do with love, but it feels like love, and it’s perhaps the first steps toward it. We cannot imagine a love that’s not evoked by the worthiness of the object—and so we try to scrub ourselves up, making ourselves as attractive and worthy as possible.
Dare we throw our religious beauty standards out the window and boldly embrace reality, instead?
God does not love you because you are good. God loves you because God is good.
I should just stop writing right here. There’s nothing more to say, and it’ll take the rest of your life to internalize this.
Our egoic selves don’t know how to wrap around this reality; it feels like a loss of power because—darn it all—there’s nothing I can do now to pull myself up and make myself a step ahead of the rest of you!
At that point, that’s the ego talking. It wants to prove that it earns this grace—the only problem is, as Paul says in Ephesians 2:4–10, grace is then no longer grace. You have dissolved the entire chem
istry of mutuality known as grace in which God always, always, takes the initiative.
Even when you find yourself in a moment desiring to pray, it’s because somehow God, in that magnetic center, caught hold of you, and God has already revealed a prayer within you—and you say, “Oh! I think I want to pray.” You have to, even at this moment, give thanks to God. It’s like a homing device, this Spirit within us, who just keeps sending out the signal to keep redirecting us toward enjoyment of our eternal union.
Whenever you want to love somebody, or forgive somebody, that’s your homing device at work—calling you home to that place of communion. It has been said that the universe is not only stranger than we think, but even stranger than we are capable of thinking.152 Our logic has to break down not only before we can comprehend the nature of the universe, but also the mystery of the Trinity.
Being part of this cosmic dance can only be known experientially. That’s why I teach centering prayer and contemplation, and really all intelligent religious rituals and practices: to lead you to a place of nakedness and vulnerability ihere your ego identity falls away, where your explanations don’t mean anything, where your superiority doesn’t matter.
You have to sit there in your naked who-ness.
If God wants to get to you, and the Trinity experience wants to come alive within you, these liminal moments are when God has the very best chance.
Accessing the Divine Force Field
As we “tune our hearts”153 to greater perception, we’ll begin to experience God almost like a force field, to borrow a metaphor from physics (gravitational, electromagnetic, light itself—they all work!). And we’re all already inside this force field, whether ie know it or not, alongside Hindus and Buddhists and every race and nationality. God doesn’t stop or begin at the Mexican/American border, the Israel/Palestine border, the border between North and South Korea, or any such line in the sand. These man-made “force fields” pale in energetic strength to the divine force field, which is all-encompassing.
When you see people protecting their small tribes and self-constructed identities as if they were lasting or inherently meaningful, you know that they’ve not yet experienced substantial reality. When you allow the flow of substantial reality through your life, you are a catholic person in the truest sense of the word, a universal person living beyond these tiny boundaries that human beings love to create. Paul puts it creatively: “Our citizenship is in heaven.”154
As I grow older, faith for me has become a daily readiness to allow and to trust the force field, knowing that it’s good, that it’s totally on my side, and that I’m already inside of it. How else can I really be at peace? I’ve never figured out a long-lasting alternative. Only in a very basic trusting and allowing can I stop fixing things in my mind, even creating mental problems so I have something to work on! The human mind lives inside of such a hamster wheel. Early-twentieth-century teacher P. D. Ouspensky invited us to “divide in [ourselves] the mechanical from the conscious, see how little there is of the conscious, how seldom it works, and how strong is the mechanical: mechanical attitudes, mechanical intentions, mechanical thoughts, mechanical desires.” Most of our deepest gifts and deepest wounds lie in our unconscious; only prayer forms that touch us there do much good.
A Trinitarian way of entering this invitation would be to renew your mind through the observing awareness of “the Helper” (Spirit) to see what’s on autopilot within you, relying on the Father to give you the upgraded consciousness inherent in the mind of Christ!155 Let’s try to unpack this.
There are many ways to describe this underlying reality of awareness, letting go, and how to enter the flow. There are so many good teachers emerging today who use different vocabulary, but who each are teaching us how to rest in this quiet holding place that watches the mental commentary rush by and also lets go of it.156
Picture this position as the “mercy seat” situated above the ark of the covenant, the portable presence that traveled around with God’s people, an open-ended horizon that had to be guarded and protected by two golden cherubim.157 Such guarding of presence is exactly the way that one becomes aware that the force field even exists. You must guard and protect your inner space. This is precisely where YHWH says to Israel, “I shall come to meet you.”158 But most have not been taught the practice or the patience to stand guard over this seemingly empty space where your Inner Witnessing Presence, your quiet Inner Knower, dwells. You must learn to trust this Knower. The Spirit is doing the knowing and loving in you, with you, and for you.159 This is at the heart of a contemplative and truly Christian epistemology. Yet so few know about this already-given gift, even few in formal ministry, it often seems.
Most Christians have not been taught contemplation. Contemplation is learning how to abide in and with the Witnessing Presence planted within you, which of course is the Holy Spirit,160 almost perfectly symbolized by the ark of the covenant. If you keep “guard,” like two cherubim, over the dangerous, open-ended space of your transient feelings and thoughts,161 you will indeed be seated on the mercy seat, where God dwells in the Spirit. The passing flotsam and jetsam on your stream of consciousness will then have little power to trap or imprison you.
The only difference between people that matters is the difference between those who allow this space to fill with flow—and those who don’t, or won’t, allow it. Like Mary, the model for contemplatives, “it is done unto you,”162 and you can only allow.
Always.
Just guard the landing field of your own consciousness with your own two golden cherubim, which will often be the two sides of almost any argument. Instead of choosing sides, protect the open space between them, and the Presence will always show itself. These will indeed be “the better angels of your nature” that Abraham Lincoln invoked during the American Civil War. They will allow the emergence of what some call “third force” responses, larger and deeper than the ordinary two sides of most arguments.
Whether as dove, fire, water, or blowing wind, the Third Force of the Holy Spirit will show itself.
You yourself are a traveling ark of the covenant; you hold and guard the space where the Presence shows itself. But the Presence, the Force Field, is already held within you.163 It only needs allowing and appreciating.
Always Creating Otherness
The Spirit’s work, if we observe, is always to create and then to fully allow otherness; creating many forms and endless diversity seems to be the plan.
Creating differences, and then preserving them in being.
God clearly loves variety. Just when you think you cannot imagine another shape, type, or way of being in this world, you watch the nature channel—or even step outside!—and there is something in the sea, air, or earth that you could never have pictured or imagined.
And then, after God creates this myriad of forms, do you know what God does?
God goes and dwells within them, exposing the inner self of God in every wondrous act of creation—flowing here, loving here, and enjoying here. We name this flowing, creative, inhabiting action Holy Spirit, who is precisely the indwelling of God in all things; this is the first and ever-continuing pattern that Christians call the “Incarnation” (“enfleshment”). By our present science, it appears to have begun around thirteen to fourteen billion years ago and is still expanding outward! We now often call it the “Let there be light” moment or “the Big Bang.” They are talking about the same thing, one with religious vocabulary seeping over into science, the other with a contemporary metaphor that seeps over into religion.
So Incarnation is not just about Jesus, and then extended somehow to you and me created in the divine image. Genesis even speaks of creation as “complete in all its array,”164 with God bringing the animals to Adam to give them each a name and thus dignity.165 Surprisingly, this even precedes the creation of Eve,166 which I interpret as “the many before any dyads.” Remember, Adam is primarily
the archetype and stand-in for the whole human race much more than any symbol of masculinity or even a historical male. The split (sectare = sex) of gender is preceded by a primal oneness, and the Scripture is not teaching that woman is derivative of man, although I know the text can appear to be saying that.
The significant thing, not much noticed up to now, is that this “ihole creation itself…[is being] brought into the same glorious freedom as the children of God”167 and is “groaning in one great act of giving birth.”168
“Born again”…and again! is first of all applied to the ihole of creation far before it is applied to individuals. This has profound and plentiful implications, of course, not the least of which being that Judeo-Christians should have been the first in line to recognize and honor evolution. The fact that many Christians fought the very idea of evolution shows how small and utterly extrinsic our notion of the Holy Spirit really is. God is still “out there” for most of us.169
The irony is that “all the birds of heaven and all the wild animals”170 do not resist, deny, or stop the flow like humans do. They don’t appear to say “Oh, I’m a dog; I wish I were a cat.” Neither do the “seed-bearing plants, and fruit trees”171 seem to complain about their fate. They willingly accept drought and flood and fire, and the endless recycling of forms that the entire universe is involved in. All accept the flow with the natural inherent grace that humans dismiss as mere “instinct.”
All creatures seem to like being ihat they are and to accept what they’re not. But humans, we’re a different story, aren’t we? We don’t like being ihat we are; and worse, we always want to be someone else. We’re mimetic and envious. We’ve traded our instincts for aspirations, wishing ie were thinner, or taller, or more handsome, or whatever, anything other than this little incarnation that we are for one gorgeous moment in time. We have a hard time finding grace in “just this”!