Trinity: Week 2
Tune Our Hearts
Friday, March 10, 2017
Being part of the cosmic dance can only be known experientially. That’s why I teach centering prayer and contemplation and try to use meaningful religious rituals and practices: to lead you to a place of nakedness and vulnerability where 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.
As we “tune our hearts” [1] to greater perception, we’ll begin to experience God almost like a force field, to borrow a metaphor from physics. We’re all already inside this force field, whether we know it or not, alongside Hindus and Buddhists and Muslims and every race and nationality. God doesn’t stop or begin at the Mexico/U.S. border, the Israel/Palestine border, the border between North and South Korea, or any such line in the sand. The divine force field 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. As Paul puts it, “Our citizenship is in heaven” (Philippians 3:20).
As I grow older, faith for me has become a daily readiness to allow and to trust the force field, knowing that it is good, that it’s totally on my side, and that I’m already inside of it. How else can I really be at peace?
Let this prayer resonate in you:
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 you in what is.
We ask for such perfect seeing—
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.
Amen. (So be it.)
Gateway to Silence:
In the love of God, the peace of Christ, and the power of the Holy Spirit
References:
[1] In the words of the classic hymn “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing” by Robert Robinson, 1758.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation (Whitaker House: 2016), 110-111, 117.
