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| Holy Trinity Icon of the Written Stone |
One of the most important guiding principles
of Christian theology was referred to in the medieval period as the maior dissimilitudo or “greater
dissimilarity.” The fourth Lateran
Council stated it nicely in 1215 when it decreed: “Between Creator and creature no similitude can be expressed without
implying a greater dissimilitude.”[1]
What this means is
that all language about God is inadequate, because God is not an object within
our universe. Our language about God is
at best analogical: we speak of God as
being like a “rock,” a “firm foundation,” or a “mighty fortress,” understanding
that whatever similarities these descriptions reveal between God and creation,
God is, nevertheless, more unlike these things than he is like them.
James Alison
points out that this is true even of the word “god,” which is a perfectly good
pagan word – theos derived from Zeus
– connoting the rivalry, violence, and decadence of the cult of
divinities. As Alison observes, “what we
mean when we apply that word to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is much
more unlike ‘god’ than it is like it. Or
it you like, the word ‘god’ is a deeply misleading starting place for us with
which to begin to talk about God, but the one we have which is least
inadequate.”[2] God is not “god,” anymore than God is “he” or
“she” or “it.”
Alison goes on to
argue that the principle of “greater dissimilarity” presupposes that it is only
by God’s grace that we are able to speak of God at all. That is to say, God has made himself
available to us at our level in such a way as to subvert our ways of understanding
“god.” “God takes us starting from where we are, with our words to do with god,
and worship, and sacrifice, and love and enables us to turn them into something
quite else, something which is not full of the fear, ambivalence, violence and
frenzy which characterize those words in their ordinary usage.” And what is
more, God must really like us to have made this possible. [3]
So before we talk
about God as Trinity, we have to remember the “greater dissimilarity” principle
that governs all language about God. With
that caveat in mind, we can begin to see that the language of the Triune God is
a way of speaking about God that tries to account for God’s “making himself
available at our level” while still being God.
It is a way of speaking about God without denying the Mystery of
God.
The language of
God as Triune is more intuitive than rational.
It is, as Fr. Greg Mayers notes, an Arcanum
– a densely coded image, the meaning of which is unavailable to the discursive
mind.[4] It communicates to us at the level of the
heart, and cannot be grasped; rather, the meaning of the Triune God grasps us
as we learn to imitate God by embracing the pattern of life revealed in Jesus
the Christ.
Jesus
the Christ is the “place” where God comes to meet us on our level as a real
human being, while remaining fully God.
In Jesus we are given to know something of what God is like, and what we
human beings are created to be like in God’s image. And what we are given is not an idea or
concept about God, but rather a life.
The reality of God is known by becoming willing to allow that life to
give shape to our lives.
What
does that life, the life of Jesus, look like?
It is a process of self-emptying, of pouring one’s self out in love
without reservation. This outpouring
creates resistance, tension, even conflict giving rise to suffering, but Jesus
embraces suffering in complete trust that love wins. Jesus does not resist resistance, but rather
embraces it in a reconciling love that births a new creation. This love conquers sin and death, giving rise
to new life.
Jesus
is the manifestation of the very life of God.
God as Father is absolute love poured out into creation. God as Son is absolute receptivity to this
outpouring in reciprocity rather than resistance. God the Holy Spirit is absolute creative
energy overflowing from this exchange of love at the heart of the divine
life. Richard Leach gives poetic
expression to this reality in his hymn, Come
Join the Dance of the Trinity:
“Come, join the dance of the Trinity, before all worlds begun – the
interweaving of the Three, the Father, Spirit, Son. The universe of space and time did not arise
by chance, but as the Three, in love and hope, made room within their dance.”
We
come to experience the creative dynamism of the divine dance, come to know God
as Triune, as we let go of our resistance to love in imitation of Jesus. It is in the act of letting go, of entrusting
ourselves to the dance, that the barriers to love are broken down and we
discover ourselves becoming part of a new creation, a way of understanding God
that is radically different from our usual ways of speaking of god.
Yesterday
morning I was returning home from the farmer’s market only to discover that,
yet again, someone was parked in front of my driveway. This has gotten to be a real pet peeve of
mine, and I was not happy. I got of out
my car and pointed out to the driver that she was blocking my driveway despite
the clearly posted sign and told her not to park there again. This was said, of course, in the nicest way
possible: with barely concealed contempt.
Now,
it so happens that Auntie Fe was out in front of the church next door as part
of her regular Saturday gardening gig.
She observed this exchange and came up to me afterwards, threw her arms
wide around me and said, “You need a hug.”
She laughed as she embraced me, sighing, “Ahh, city living!” Her reconciling embrace cut right through my
resistance to love in that moment. I was
able to let go of my resentment, entitlement, and self-centeredness and rejoin
the dance because Auntie Fe saw someone who needed a hug, rather than a priest
being a jerk.
Jesus
meets our resistance to love with a great big hug, and invites us to let go of
everything the keeps us from participating in the divine dance. Like Auntie Fe, we imitate Jesus when we
create space for others to let go into the dance. This “act of letting go” is what St. Paul
calls “faith”:
Since we are
justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,
through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we
boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also
boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and
endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not
disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the
Holy Spirit that has been given to us.[5]
The act of letting
go, of entrusting ourselves to the dance in imitation of Jesus, makes available
a peace and a grace that is a sharing in the very life of God. It sweeps us up into the dynamic outpouring
of love that embraces suffering willingly because of our trust that love wins:
a trust born of our experience of love overcoming our own resistance to love
and making us new. We come to know the
Triune God as we do that which God does, from before all time, world without
end: pour out love.
St. Paul rightly
observes that our faith in God – our entrusting ourselves to the divine dance –
is a gift, a function of willingness rather than willfulness. God’s love has been poured into our
hearts. We initiate nothing and secure
nothing by our self-will. The issue is
our response: resistance or receptivity.
As we come to imitate Jesus more fully,
becoming more and more transparent to love, we pour ourselves out more and
more. We become “selfless” because we
know that we have nothing to secure or defend.
We can then choose suffering for the sake of love in confidence that
nothing can finally separate us from love; not even death.
The Cross is a symbol of love for Jesus’
followers because it was chosen freely.
It is the image of God’s continual pouring out of love in the face of
all that resists love. But here we must
be careful. Suffering is not chosen as
an end in itself or even as a means to and end, as if God required it. Rather it is embraced as a byproduct of the
resistance to love that we experience as disciples of Jesus. As Jon Sobrino notes,
Spirituality
based on the cross does not mean merely the acceptance of sadness, pain, and
sorrow; it does not mean simply passivity and resignation . . . rather it is a
spirituality focused on the following of Jesus.
Not all suffering is specifically Christian; only that which flows from
following Jesus is.[6]
Suffering in imitation of Jesus results from opposition
to suffering that comes from resistance to love. It is suffering that comes from refusing to
resist resistance with anything other than love.
Elizabeth Johnson captures the relationship
of suffering to the imitation of Jesus, which opens us to sharing in the life
of the Triune God, when she writes that
. . . God
intends to put an end to the all the crosses of history. If so, soteriology [the understanding of
salvation] shifts from the model of God as perpetrator of the disaster of the
cross to the model of God as participant in the pain of the world. In Jesus the Holy One enters into solidarity
with suffering people in order to release hope and bring new life.[7]
We might even go so far as Hilary of Potiers,
who said, “It is not inaccurate to say that God became weak and powerless and
suffered and died on the Cross.”
With Hilary of Potiers, we have indeed come a
long way from understanding God as one of the gods. God is not god. The Triune is an abyss of love continually
poured out into creation, a dynamic exchange of love that overcomes the
otherness of the other without destroying it.
Nothing finally can separate us from this love; not even our resistance
to it. The Triune suffers with us because
God refuses to coerce us in any way; otherwise, love would cease to be love and
nothing could be reconciled.
God’s love has been poured into us through
the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.
To accept this love, to imitate it, is to realize the Triune in our own
lives. We can pour ourselves out in
love, because love never ends. The
Trinity is an invitation to join the dance.
[1]
James Alison, Worship in a Violent World,
p. 1.
[2]
Alison, p. 1.
[4] Arcanum, talk by Fr. Greg Mayers
recorded at http://www.mercy-center.org/Resources/GregMayersTalks.html.
[5]
Romans 5:1-5
[6]
Quoted in Terrance Rynne, Gandhi &
Jesus: The Saving Power of Nonviolence (New York: Orbis Books, 2008) p. 147.
[7]
Quoted in Rynne, p. 147.
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