by Richard Rohr
God cannot not see his Son Jesus in you. You are the body of Christ. You are bone of God’s bone, and that’s why God cannot stop loving you. That’s why no amount of effort will make God love you any more than God loves you right now. And despite your best efforts to be terrible, you can’t make God love you any less than God loves you right now.
You are in a position of total powerlessness, and your ego is fighting it. All you can do is surrender and enter into this dance of unhindered dialogue, this circle of praise, this web of communion that we call the Blessed Trinity.
From the beginning of this attempt to unravel the mystery of Trinity, I have been astounded by the ability of this doctrine, which appeared so abstruse, rarified, distant, and even meaningless, to transport us to a different universe.
It’s a different-shaped Christianity. It’s a different-shaped cosmology, as it should be if this is the shape of all things, not only of God but of everything else.
What About the Wrath of God?
So where is wrath in a Trinitarian God? You probably grew up hearing passages about God’s wrath from the Hebrew Scriptures (the Christian Old Testament); and even Paul refers to “the wrath of God.”197 Therefore you rightly say, “Well, why are there such passages in Holy Writ?”
Why, indeed? In certain biblical narratives, God seems to be upset for a few days. God isn’t loving us, it appears. And of course, that’s understandably our reading of our own experience, finding language for what our lineage eventually names “dark nights of the soul”—those periods where we’re not experiencing the grace, love, and given-ness of existence. We project this all onto God; isn’t it obvious?
This doesn’t mean, of course, that the divine given-ness is not objectively here. It is just that we are not drawing upon it. For whatever reason, we’re not accessing it, enjoying it, or participating in it. Scripture, as Peter Enns so artfully put it, is also fully human and fully divine.198 Scripture is always, always written by humans from a human perspective. We call it the “word of God,” but the only Word of God unequivocally endorsed in the Bible’s pages is Jesus, the eternal Logos. The words on our inspired pages are the words of men and women.
In my book Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, I describe the Bible itself as a gradual progression forward.199 You see the narrative arc moving toward an ever-more-developed theology of grace, until Jesus becomes grace personified. But it’s a concept that the psyche is never fully ready for. We resist it, and so you’ll see in most of the biblical text what the late anthropologist Rene Girard calls a “text in travail,” a suffering text. And we must see that is still true in the New Testament, where even John’s statements about God’s unconditional love are still interspersed with many lines that seem to imply a conditional love, too: “If you obey my commandments” is either directly said or implied many times. To grow in the ways of love, I think this shows real genius. Psychologically, humans actually need some conditional love to lead us toward the recognition of and the need for unconditional love. This is much of my assumption in my book Falling Upward.200
We get the promise of free love (grace) now and then, but it is always too much for the mind and heart to believe.
The biblical text mirrors both the growth and the resistance of the soul.
It falls into the mystery, and then it says, “That just can’t be true.” Scripture is a polyphonic symphony, a conversation with itself, where it plays melodies and dissonance—three steps forward, two steps back. The three steps gradually and finally win out; you see the momentum of our Holy Book and where it is leading history. And the text moves inexorably toward inclusivity, mercy, unconditional love, and forgiveness. I call it the “Jesus hermeneutic.” Just interpret Scripture the way that Jesus did! He ignores, denies, or openly opposes his own Scriptures whenever they are imperialistic, punitive, exclusionary, or tribal. Check it out for yourself.201
This is why the Bible is the best book in the world, and if we’re honest, it has often been the worst book in the world—not because of its content but because of the spiritual maturity of those reading it. In the hands of loveless fundamentalists, it could be credited with more rigidity, bigotry, hatefulness, war, evil, and killing than almost any other book on this planet. You know that is true. It is only comfortable people in the dominant group who do not see this now.
St. Thomas Aquinas taught that the corruption of the best is the worst. So the Bible is capable of great good, but we all understand it at our own stage of emotional and spiritual development. If you are still a black-and-white, rigid thinker who needs certitude and control at every step—well, the Trinity will feel out of reach. Grace shows up where logic breaks down, so you won’t go very far. No matter what passage is given to you, you will interpret it in a stingy, vengeful, controlling way—because that’s the way you do life.
Trinity gradually becomes real for you as you honestly enter into the cycles and flow of life and death yourself. This is what we mean when we say “we are saved by the death and resurrection of Jesus.” Exactly! First of all, we have to grow up, which is largely learning how to live on the waterwheel of giving and receiving love. Quite simply, when you’ve found the flow in here, you’ll see it over there. We call this the Principle of Likeness.
Hateful people see hatred everywhere else, have you noticed that? They’re always thinking someone’s out to screw them over, someone’s trying to hurt them. They create problems wherever they go. We call them “high-maintenance” people.
On the other hand, certain people come up to me and say, “Oh, Richard, you’re just so loving.” How I wish I were! I love intermittently, it’s true, on my better days; but invariably, people who say this to me are themselves very loving people! In that complimenting moment, they’re pulling it out of me.
People accuse me of all kinds of things, both wonderful and terrible. They’re usually half-right, of course. But invariably, they’re talking about themselves, and they can’t see it. This principle of likeness has positive and negative manifestations—what you see over there is what you are in here. Always. Mistrustful people don’t know how to trust themselves or anybody else, and so they lay it on you.
The Trinity beautifully undoes this negativity by a totally, totally—and we can’t emphasize the totally enough—a totally positive movement that never reverses its direction.
Our mixed pattern of forward and backward is illustrated throughout the Bible, which often reverses its direction or undoes itself. After awhile, you will spot this naturally. But the Divine Generosity is not undone in the Trinity, who only gives.
God is always giving, even in those moments when we momentarily experience the inaccessibility of love as if it were divine anger. When you find yourself drawing these conclusions, be close to your soul for a moment. You are angry at yourself in that moment. All of us probably go through that at least twice a day. Why did I do that? we accuse ourselves—or blame it on God. Really!
How can you get out of this vicious cycle? Own your projections—those onto other people, those onto your own motives, and perhaps especially those onto God. In reality, God is the divine lure who is most equipped to pull you out of this circle of negativity. But if you ascribe negativity onto God, too, you’re really in trouble spiritually because you’ve got no way out now, without traversing Kubler-Ross’s first four stages of both grief and dying—denial, anger, bargaining, and depression—before you can get to the fifth stage, which is divine acceptance.
This now-evident pattern is why so many of our contemporary spiritual teachers say that most of our problems are psychological in their manifestation, but spiritual in their solution. Most Christians of the Middle Ages more easily trusted the spiritual solution than we do, but they seldom had the vocabulary to describe the psychological manifestations as we do today. We articulate the psychological dimensions so well, and in so many ways, that contemporary people are trapped in sophisticated and he
lpful descriptions of the manifestations but have no One to surrender it all to. There is no Receiver Station, because we jumped off the divine waterwheel and withdrew from the dance.
To sum it all up, I do not believe there is any wrath in God whatsoever—it’s theologically impossible when God is Trinity.
Expanding Our Horizons
Our second point in exploring “Why the Trinity? Why Now?” concerns a movement toward a broadened theological vocabulary. If you don’t mind, I’m going to take some hints about Trinity from outside of Christianity. In our highly polarized religious climate, I understand that some Christians have been taught for generations to be afraid of anything that doesn’t come “purely” from “our” sources. Ironically enough, our own Scripture contains ample examples of appreciative appraisal of elements of neighboring faiths, whether it’s Eastern pagan astrologers accurately divining the birth of the Christ child and worshipping him,202 syncretistic-heterodox Samaritans being the heroes of parable and encounter,203 Greek philosophy offering us its concept of logos,204 or approving citations of neo-Platonic poetry as pointing to the all-in-all nature of the one true God!205
We are fearful; God, apparently, is fearless.
If the truth is the truth…if God is one…then there’s one reality and there’s one truth.206 You’d think we’d be happy when other religions deduce approximately the same thing, wouldn’t you? But oh, sometimes we get so upset. We don’t know how to recognize friends, and we create enemies for no good reason.
Hinduism is probably the oldest still-existing religion on earth, its foundation going back five millennia. In Hindu theology and in the Hindi language, there are three qualities of God—and therefore, of all reality. I heard these words frequently when I was teaching in India some years ago: sat, chit, ananda.
I won’t even have to work hard to make the Trinitarian point here; it’s obvious, I am sure:
Sat is the word for “being.” God is being itself; it’s hard to get more expansive than that. Hinduism seemed to implicitly recognize this, exactly as Paul says to the Athenians in his aforementioned stump speech at Mars Hill.207 Universal Being, the Source of all being, whom we call Father.
Chit is the word for consciousness or knowledge. God is consciousness itself, mind itself, awareness itself. Does that sound anything like logos? It should. Of course, our biblical concept of logos was drawn from Greek philosophy; the writer of the gospel of John has already done what I’m doing now, drawing from extra-biblical (and extra-Judaic) wisdom.208 Now more than ever, we have to draw from our shared spiritual heritage to better understand our own belief.
And, finally, ananda. I met a number of people named Ananda in India. It means happiness—bliss is the way Indians usually translate it. Does this sound like the joy of the Holy Spirit? Inherent, uncreated happiness, which is what you experience when you live without resistance inside the flow. It’s omnidirectional, not determined by any one object that makes you happy. You don’t know where it came from, just as Jesus said of the Spirit.209 You can’t capture it, predict it, or prove it; you can only enjoy it when the dove descends, the wind blows, the fire falls, or the water flows. Like grace itself, ananda is always a gift from “nowhere.”
Sat-chit-ananda.
Being-knowledge-happiness.
Father-Son-Spirit.
Truth is one, and universal.
Silence: Father
The Father is Being itself, the Source of the flow, the Creator—the formless One out of which all form comes. God as “nothingness,” unspeakable Mystery.210
In our contemplative heritage, God the Father is normally experienced best in silence, beyond words or pronunciation, which is exactly what the Jewish people insisted upon.211 This preserves our humility before God so we don’t think that any word will ever comprehend the divine incomprehensibility.212
In the long tradition of Christian mysticism, there were two great strains of knowing that were both needed to keep the believer balanced, humble, and open.
The first way of knowing, which was more commonly practiced, was called the kataphatic (seen according to light) or the “positive” way—relying on defined words, clear concepts, pictures, and rituals. Christ as Logos, image, and manifestation embodies this kataphatic, or via positiva, pole.
And when religion is healthy, happy, and mystical, the way of light needs to be balanced by the apophatic (against the light) or “negative” way of darkness—knowing beyond words and images through silence, darkness, open space, and releasing the need to know. This via negativa is represented by the Ground of Being, or “Father.”
The apophatic has largely disappeared in the last five hundred years; almost all congregations, parishes, and ordinary Christians are entirely kataphatic. This has resulted in an eclipse of the “Father.”
The great spiritual teachers always balance knowing with not-knowing, light with darkness. Both ways are necessary, and together they create a magnificent form of higher non-dual consciousness called faith. I see this energy between—the healthy interplay between kataphatic and apophatic—as where the Spirit shows up to play.
Unfortunately, this dynamism is not often present. The apophatic has almost always been in the minority, as we in civilization are uncomfortable with silence, wonder, and not-knowing. Only the mystics preserved this apophatic path, along with some of the sacramental traditions in worship. But even these were suspect by Protestants who threw out the mystical and sacramental baby with the medieval Catholic bathwater, although the Quakers have certainly tried to recover a uniquely Protestant sense of mysticism, along with a perspective that all of life is sacramental—that is, as an outward sign of inward divine presence.
Most of us do not know the ground of silence before speaking, the spaciousness around words, the inner repose after words, the humility that words should require. This was instinctual for our ancient ancestors before the advent of organized agriculture, cities, and civilization—and it is still much more strongly present in First Nations and indigenous cultures where these ancient instincts are better tended.213
This is the realm of “the Father”—who cannot be spoken, who cannot be named. God named Father is precisely the Un-manifest, the Great Silence, the Unspeakability of God. We were so anxious to speak words that were infallible and inerrant that we bet all our money on words to get us there, even forgetting that words themselves are always metaphors.
We basically repressed God the Father, whose reputation had already been seriously tarnished by unhealthy patriarchy in general, and penal substitutionary atonement theory in particular, where he became completely unfree, incapable of forgiveness, bound by a very limited notion of justice—and frankly petty and punitive. We feared the Father more than loved him. This loss alone is enough to reveal why Christianity needs to rediscover all three persons of the Trinity anew, along with the entire “apophatic trinity” of humility, darkness, and silence.
Don’t think that this metaphor “Father” is trying to ascribe gender to God. God is not masculine. That’s not the point. It simply became the classic term because Abba is the word that Jesus used to connote safety and endearment. It is actually a child’s word, closest to Papa or Daddy. But unfortunately, it suffers today from centuries of being heard (and used) inside patriarchal cultures, implicitly validating a hierarchical worldview.
The Abba-Father of Jesus, by contrast, is much more moving inside a circle than at the top of any pyramid. Read Sandra Schneiders’s now classic small study Women and the Word, where she very effectively demonstrates that Jesus probably had to come in a male body to undo any patriarchal notion of God from the inside out.214
Of course, the mind is humbled before such unnameability, such incomprehensibility, as we recognize again that all metaphors limp.
In the first metaphor offered to Moses, YHWH refuses all picture words. Moses, barefoot and astonished, asks, “Give me your name.”<
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The Unnameable One replies, “I am who I am.”215
There are probably ten good ways to translate that. I’m not saying this is the perfect one, but basically, this One says, “It’s none of your business. Don’t you try to capture me by a name. Don’t you try to contort me into any little box. I will be who I will be.”
It’s the great Jewish tetragrammaton, which we’re lucky to have right over our St. Francis cathedral in my home near Santa Fe: יהוה
It is, I believe, the only cathedral entrance in America that has it right above the door: I Am Who I Am. During the cathedral’s construction in the nineteenth century, Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy put it there in honor of and respect for the Jewish tradition and people.
In some ways, the prayer that we let resonate in us earlier and that we continue to explore through this book sums up everything I want to say here:
God for us, we call you Father.
God alongside us, we call you Jesus.
God within us, we call you Holy Spirit.
You are the eternal mystery that enables, enfolds, and enlivens all things,
Even us and even me.
Every name falls short of your goodness and greatness.
We can only see who you are in what is.
We ask for such perfect seeing—
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.
Amen.
God for us is my code word for the Father. That reality is foundationally givenness. Do you understand? Reality is foundationally benevolent; it’s on your side. It’s not a scary universe. That’s why the word Father is a good choice, if you’ve had a good father. A good father is protective of you. And again, this is attested to by the contemplative apophatic and the Hindi sat.
The Living Manifestation: The Christ
In the second person of the Trinity, we have the visible epiphany of the Unmanifest One. First in the form of creation itself—which is “the Christ” in our shorthand—and secondly in personal form, whom we call “Jesus.” Someone who reverences the first epiphany (apophatic, sat) is surely best prepared to rightly reverence the second—kataphasis, chit. Up to now, we’ve led many people to love Jesus, but many less were led to recognize, honor, and love the Christ. The major future task of Christian theology and practice is to finally join the two together.