The Circle Dance

This Sunday (26.05) is Trinity Sunday. It's the day Churches all round the world pause and reflect on the God who is three-in-one!

The fourth-century Cappadocian Fathers tried to communicate the notion of life as mutual participation by calling the Trinitarian flow a "circular rotation" (peri-choresis) between the three. They were saying that whatever is going on in God is a flow that’s like a dance; and God is not just the dancer, God is the dance itself! 

The Incarnation is a movement—Jesus comes forth from the Father and the Holy Spirit to take us back with him into this eternal embrace, from which we first came (John 14:3). We are invited to join in the dance and have participatory knowledge of God through the Trinity.

Trinity is the very nature of God, and this God is a circle dance, a centrifugal force flowing outward, and then drawing all things into the dance centripetally. If this God names himself/herself in creation and in reality then there must be a “family resemblance” between everything else and the nature of the heart of God.

Scientists are discovering this reality as they look through microscopes and telescopes. They are finding that the energy is in the space between the particles of the atom and between the planets and the stars. They are discovering that reality is absolutely relational at all levels. When you really understand Trinity, however slightly, it’s like you live in a different universe. And a very good and inviting one!

Adapted from: The Divine Dance: Exploring the Mystery of Trinity. Richard Rohr. Source

We Do Not Know What We Are Doing

Taken from Richard Rohr's Daily Meditations | Friday, March 29, 2024

Brian McLaren invites us to an imaginative experience of the painful reality of scapegoating that occurred on Good Friday:

Let’s imagine ourselves with the disciples just before three o’clock on this Friday afternoon. A few of us have come together to talk about what has happened over the last twenty-four hours….

Why was there no other way? Why did this good man—the best we have ever known, the best we have ever imagined—have to face torture and execution as if he were some evil monster?

As the hours drag on from noon to nearly three o’clock, we imagine many reasons….

Jesus has told us again and again that God is different from our assumptions. We’ve assumed that God was righteous and pure in a way that makes God hate the unrighteous and impure. But Jesus has told us that God is pure love, so overflowing in goodness that God pours out compassion on the pure and impure alike. He not only has told us of God’s unbounded compassion—he has embodied it every day as we have walked this road with him. In the way he has sat at table with everyone, in the way he has never been afraid to be called a “friend of sinners,” in the way he has touched untouchables and refused to condemn even the most notorious of sinners, he has embodied for us a very different vision of what God is like….

If Jesus is showing us something so radical about God, what is he telling us about ourselves—about human beings and our social and religious institutions? What does it mean when our political leaders and our religious leaders come together to mock and torture and kill God’s messenger?... Is this the only way religions and governments maintain order—by threatening us with pain, shame, and death if we don’t comply? And is this how they unify us—by turning us into a mob that comes together in its shared hatred of the latest failure, loser, rebel, criminal, outcast … or prophet?... What kind of world have we made? What kind of people have we become?...

In the middle of the afternoon … even from this distance, we can hear Jesus, “Father, forgive them!” he shouts. “For they don’t know what they are doing.”

Forgive them? Forgive us?

Our thoughts bring us again to the garden last night, when Jesus asked if there could be any other way. And now it seems clear. There could be no other way to show us what God is truly like. God is not revealed in killing and conquest … in violence and hate. God is revealed in this crucified man—giving of himself to the very last breath, giving and forgiving.

And there could be no other way to show us what we are truly like. We do not know what we are doing, indeed.

If God is like this, and if we are like this … everything must change.

Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation | Nature as the First Bible

Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation

The Laas Geel cave paintings (detail), Laas Geel, Somalia, Horn of Africa (9,000-3,000 BCE)

Nature as the First Bible

Bearing the Divine Fingerprint Wednesday, January 21, 2015

If you would learn more, ask the cattle, Seek information from the birds of the air. The creeping things of earth will give you lessons, And the fishes of the sea will tell you all. There is not a single creature that does not know That everything is of God's making. God holds in power the soul of every living thing, And the breath of every human body. -Book of Job 12:7-10 It is strange that we should have to write, assert, or try to prove what should be obvious: everything bears the divine fingerprint, footprint, and "similitude." The people from the three monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam should have been the first to enjoy this shared truth, beauty, and goodness. These are the ones who assert that "there is one Creator God who made all things"! Yet it has usually been the Native religions, the Hindus, the Jains, and the Buddhists who have more honored the other creatures and the natural world. The monotheistic religions (also known as the Religions of the Book), each in their own way, overly intellectualized those very books. They became fodder for scholars and sectarians instead of opening paths to transformation for everybody. We usually gutted them of cosmic significance, reflecting their time in history, and used scriptures to assert our tribal superiority over other religions and certainly over all other creatures, so much so that they could not really see what should have been clear, obvious, and compelling. Some have called it an idolatry of words. Rest of the article HERE

Silence as the Heart of Prayer

A recent Richard Rohr reflection: When peaceful silence lay over all, and when night had run half way her swift course, down from the heavens, from the royal throne, leapt your all-powerful Word. – Book of Wisdom 18:14-15 Words are necessarily dualistic. That is their function. They distinguish this from that, and that’s good. But silence has the wonderful ability to not need to distinguish this from that! As in the magnificent quote above from the Catholic Bible, the divine word itself can only enter the world in silence and at nighttime. Silence can hold impossibilities together in a quiet, tantric embrace. Silence, especially loving silence, is always non-dual, and that is much of its secret power. It stays with mystery, holds tensions, absorbs contradictions, and smiles at paradoxes—leaving them unresolved, and happily so. Any good poet knows this, as do many masters of musical chords. Politicians, engineers, accountants, and most seminary trained clergy have a much harder time.