Relationships
The Template of Reality
Sunday, April 29, 2018
God is love. —1 John 4:8
The physical structure of the universe is love. —Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) [1]
If a loving Creator started this whole thing—the Big Bang, the evolution of diverse and beautiful life forms—then there has to be a “DNA connection,” as it were, between the One who creates and what is created. The basic template of reality is Trinitarian, it’s relational. God is relationship.
“Let us create in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves,” the Creator says (see Genesis 1:26). The Hebrew writer used the plural pronouns for some wonderful reason.
St. Bonaventure (1221-1274) called the Trinity a “fountain fullness” of love. [2] God is unhindered dialogue, a positive and inclusive flow, an eternal waterwheel of self-emptying and outpouring love—that knows it can completely self-empty because it will always be filled back up. This is the very definition and description of divine love; all human love merely imitates, approximates, and celebrates this same pattern.
The energy in the universe is not in the planets or in the protons or neutrons, but in the relationship between them. Not in the particles but in the space between them. Not in the cells of organisms but in the way the cells feed and give feedback to one another. Not in any precise definition of the three persons of the Trinity as much as in the relationship between the Three! This is where all the power for infinite renewal is at work:
The loving relationship between them. The infinite love flowing between them. The dance itself.
References:
[1] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, trans. J. M. Cohen, “Sketch of a Personal Universe,” Human Energy (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: 1962), 72.
[2] Bonaventure, Breviloquium, part 1, “On the Trinity of God.”
Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation (Whitaker House: 2016), 43, 55, 56; and
Richard Rohr, God As Us: The Sacred Feminine and the Sacred Masculine, disc 2 (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2011), DVD, CD, MP3 download.
