Trinity

"I’ll never forget that night. I drove hundreds of miles to visit one of my best friends. We hadn’t seen each other, face-to-face, in years. We stayed up half the night talking; in addition to just catching up in person, which was amazing and surreal all at once, we discussed the fact that I was facing a significant crossroads in my life—I didn’t know what to do...

I was unhappy; I was lonely. Even here, spending time with one of my dearest friends, I felt invisible... The jig—as they say—was up. And, having dropped out of this dance of desperation, a few decades of feeling left out caught up with me—all on one lonely, anguished night. I felt abandoned. Disconnected—not only in the awkward gait of my relationships with others, but also being ill at ease in my own body. Wondering what life on this increasingly distressed planet was all about. And...to be honest, I felt like God was the Most Estranged Stranger of  them all. Like a faded blue ribbon, collecting dust in my childhood closet…

I decided to pray. Not just any prayer, mind you, but contemplative prayer—a kind of minimalist prayer of letting go, where less is more. For me, it’s held as the barest intention to be, sitting in my part-ness before the All. It’s wordless prayer, where one sits dignified and humbled all at once, before the God of one’s understanding. And just maybe, one hopes to encounter the God beyond one’s understanding. In contemplative prayer, there is no “goal”—only the simple intent to be present, in compassion, to the One Who (we hope against hope) is love. But that night I wasn’t feeling love; I was feeling devastated. Feeling left out of the flow that seemed to draw some folks together, while all too many of us were floundering, apart. Reaching out to people, reaching out to God, going within—I’d dredged all these bodies of the supposed deep but had been coming up with nothing. Still, I wanted to be attentive to this moment in time—this instance of prayer…

This moment became an eternal moment; this instance became an All-now. Tune my heart to sing Thy grace was reverberating in my body like a bell, and it felt as though my heart—emptied of all else save the All-now—could pick up the very vibration of grace. I happened to have two artifacts with me at my impromptu contemplative prayer space: a small Tibetan singing bowl and my favorite icon—Andrei Rublev’s Trinity. “Tune my heart to sing Thy grace,” I whispered slowly but urgently: an active prayer of opening, in-chime with the singing bowl… My whispered refrain and my tracing of the edge of the singing bowl with its mallet came haltingly at first, but then with growing sound and conviction. The vibrations of the bowl melded with the vibrations of my words, becoming a kind of physical artifact in themselves, hanging in the air. I repeated both the chiming and the whispered singing a few more times, and then I sat in the thickness that I was now aware of, everywhere—riveted, attuned. And that’s when it felt like the roof of perception as I knew it ripped open, and grace-tuned reality as I suspect it Actually Is came flooding in: my chest, my eyes, and my limbs felt overwhelmed—but even this was but a herald:

Blessed Trinity—not the icon, but the ever-loving vibrancy of the Three-in-One self, signified by this beloved etching - suddenly filled the room. Which might sound odd to hear, I know!

But I bowed low, honoring this depiction of Father, Son, and Spirit—or Abba, Isa, and Ruah, as I’ve come to know them, named in the Middle Eastern tongues near my ancestral Turkey—reclining at a table together, a communion of bread and wine marking their communion with each other. Such graciousness, deference, and forbearance played on each member’s face, sounding-through a kind of acceptance, admiration, and compassion that began evaporating my sense of isolation…

I wasn’t bowing to the icon; I was honoring the Reality behind and through it, which spilled into this living room, in living color. My feelings of being alone, disembodied, and disconnected were playfully challenged by what I can only describe as a steady Trinitarian gaze of unconditional presence: kissing the ground seemed the only appropriate response. “You are so kind.” I found these words escaping my lips, as sheer Divine goodness became more and more palpable to me—not only in the space of the room, but throughout time as well.

I began weeping; this loving, Divine presence was moving effortlessly through my at-times hackneyed biography, backward in time, lighting dark corners of my life’s story. Lifting grime off pages long-since accepted as inevitably stained. My pulp fiction of a narrative began feeling like an illuminated manuscript. It felt as if the “Author and Finisher of our faith” was editing my life, not changing one iota of the action but leaving the story noticeably better and more coherent. Trinity was reweaving the fabric of my life forward in time, as well, using the same material but producing a much finer thread count.

“I am open; I am open!” I found myself exclaiming, which startled me. It felt like the channel was finally clear for so much more compassion, grace, acceptance, and belonging to pass through my being, and not stopping with me but even flowing on to—and through—others. In and As And oh—the others!..

The circle of Trinity became a conga line: of family, of friends, and even of enemies. It turns out, everyone had a case of mistaken identity. I began seeing their faces, one after another: parents, old roommates, confidants, and ex-friends far and near. Thinking of each one of them made me weep afresh. It was like I was being met by the Universe in each of their lovely forms. Even seeing the faces of people whom I’d generally regarded as having wounded me didn’t faze me—I now saw pristine intentions through their flawed actions. Their hurtful actions, and my hurtful actions? They were simply misapprehensions of love. We just didn’t know any better, playing partial and ignorant of the flow as we were—how could we? But now I knew. And so I loved all of them back—with a blazing intensity. “I’m ready, I’m finally ready,” I said, amazed at the radiance I was experiencing on this otherwise ordinary night in a house in the woods… in this moment… everything made sense…

Nearly half a decade on from that fateful encounter with Trinity in and as my life, I’m still not the same: it seeded a continuous renewal of that timeless time and placeless place, which I experience—haltingly to be sure, but consistently—as the ground of my being… We can say, “It’s like—it’s similar to...,” but we can never say, “It is...” because we are in the realm of beyond, of transcendence, of mystery. And we must - absolutely must—maintain a fundamental humility before the Great Mystery…

It took three centuries of reflection on the Gospels to have the courage to say it, but they of this land—which included Paul of Tarsus before them and Mevlânâ Rumi of Konya afterward - circled around to the best metaphor they could find: Whatever is going on in God is a flow, a radical relatedness, a perfect communion between Three—a circle dance of love. And God is not just a dancer; God is the dance itself…

“The Lord appeared to Abraham near the great trees of Mamre while he was sitting at the entrance to his tent in the heat of the day. Abraham looked up and saw three men standing nearby. When he saw them, he hurried from the entrance of his tent to meet them and bowed low to the ground…”

Created by Russian iconographer Andrei Rublev in the fifteenth century, The Trinity is the icon of icons for many of us—and, as I would discover years after first encountering it, even more invitational than most. By my lights, it is the most perfect piece of religious art there is; I’ve always had a copy of it hanging in my room. The original is still on display in the Tretyakov gallery in Moscow…

The Holy One in the form of Three—eating and drinking, in infinite hospitality and utter enjoyment between themselves. If we take the depiction of God in The Trinity seriously, we have to say, “In the beginning was the Relationship.” This icon yields more fruits the more you gaze on it. Every part of it was obviously meditated on with great care: the gaze between the Three; the deep respect between them as they all share from a common bowl. And note the hand of the Spirit pointing toward the open and fourth place at the table! Is the Holy Spirit inviting, offering, and clearing space? If so, for what?

At the heart of Christian revelation, God is not seen as a distant, static monarch but—as we will explore together—a divine circle dance, as the early Fathers of the church dared to call it (in Greek perichoresis, the origin of our word choreography). God is the Holy One presenced in the dynamic and loving action of Three. But even this Three-Fullness does not like to eat alone. This invitation to share at the divine table is probably the first biblical hint of what we would eventually call “salvation.” Jesus comes forth from this Eternal Fullness, allowing us to see ourselves mirrored, as a part of this table fellowship—as a participant at this banquet and as a partner in God’s eternal dance of love and communion…”

I want you to take this image into yourself as you read. I invite you to recognize that this Table is not reserved exclusively for the Three, nor is the divine circle dance a closed circle: we’re all invited in. All creation is invited in, and this is the liberation God intended from the very beginning. This divine intention—this audacious invitation—is embedded in creation itself; it later becomes concrete, personal, and touchable in Jesus… Our final goal of union with God is grounded in creation itself, and also in our own unique creation. Our starting place was always original goodness, not original sin. This makes our ending place—and everything in between - possessing an inherent capacity for goodness, truth, and beauty. Salvation is not some occasional, later emergency additive but God’s ultimate intention from the very beginning, even “written in our hearts.”

Are you ready to take your place at this wondrous table? Can you imagine that you are already a part of the dance?"

~ The Divine Dance

~ Fr. Richard Rohr is a globally recognized teacher and the author of numerous books. Fr. Richard’s teaching is grounded in Franciscan practices of contemplation and self-emptying, expressing themselves in radical compassion, particularly for the socially marginalized.

~ Mike Morrell is the Communications Director for the Integral Theology think tank Presence International, cofounder of The Buzz Seminar, and a founding organizer of the justice, arts, and spirituality Wild Goose Festival.

~ “The Trinity is an icon created by Russian painter Andrei Rublev in the 15th century. It is his most famous work and the most famous of all Russian icons, and it is regarded as one of the highest achievements of Russian art. The Trinity depicts the three angels who visited Abraham at the Oak of Mamre (Genesis 18:1–8), but the painting is full of symbolism and is interpreted as an icon of the Holy Trinity. At the time of Rublev, the Holy Trinity was the embodiment of spiritual unity, peace, harmony, mutual love and humility.” ~ Wikipedia