In the beginning is the relationship, and reality is
relational all the way through and all the way down. It’s all about relationship. This is an existential truth, deeply rooted
in our experience. That is what the
Christian symbol of God as Trinity tries to convey.
Unfortunately, the traditional language of Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit, and the idea of these being three “persons,” tends toward a kind
of tri-theism. This language is, of
course, rooted in the biblical texts, but there it is invoked in a narrative
context in which the meaning of the terms is clearly derived from the character
of God’s relationship with the world. In
literature, individuals are not presented in the abstract and then proceed to
have relationships. Rather, it is
through engaging in relationships that the character of a person is revealed.[1] Experience gives rise to the symbol, and what
is being expressed in the symbol of God as Trinity is an experience of
relationship.
As this narrative language was taken up into philosophical
speculation, the symbols, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, were easily
misunderstood as three substantial beings who have a relationship with each
other. But that is not what the early
theologians of the church were trying to convey. Following the biblical tradition, they
experienced God’s power in relationship to the Source of the created world, to
Jesus as the incarnation of that Source, and to the Spirit of love pervading
the relationship that is invisible but still concretely present.
This experience of relationship is so powerful that they
imagined God as relationship without remainder; not as three persons who have
relationships, but rather three subsistent relations distinct but constitutive
of one divine reality. God simply is the
relations that God has.[2] The substantive nouns drawn from biblical
narrative used to describe these subsistent relations obscures their dynamic
and interdependent character. What the
Symbol of the Trinity expresses is the character of reality as emergent
(deriving from a Source rather than self-generating), as evolving (the becoming
of all that is), and as internally related (revealing an implicate order in its
dynamism).
Raimon Panikkar argues that the Christian doctrine of the
Trinity is a homeomorphic equivalent to the nondual advaita tradition in India: emphasizing
the constitutive relational nature of reality that cannot be characterized as either
unity or duality. This is difficult to
grasp, because we have internalized so deeply the ideology of liberal
individualism. We really do think we are
absolutely independent, self-constituted monads bumping against each other like
so many billiard balls; merely externally related, if at all.
But that is not the case.
It is my relationship to you that makes you, “you,” and me, “me.” We are internally related to each other and
co-constitutive of our identities. I am “me”
in relationship to “you,” and you are “you” in relationship to “me.” This explains why the death of a loved one is
so wrenching; or a divorce, or even a child growing up and going off to
college. Notice, too, that this means
that I am “me” only in so far as I am for “you;” and you are “you” only in so
far as you are for “me;” we are the energy of love that unites us. In this way, we participate in the very life
of God, the subsistent relations within the Godhead that constitute the
generative, self-giving, dynamic of love.
We are constituted by, and constitutive of, a universe that
is an irreversible, emergent process.
The universe is an evolving constellation of relationships moving toward
greater complexity and consciousness, marked by centricity or self-organization
at every level from the physical to the biological to reflexive-consciousness. Each
self-organizing part is constitutive of a larger whole, from the atom to the
molecule to the cell to the organism to the ecosystem to the planet to the
cosmos. Each is related to all.
There is a convergence underway in the new sciences of
quantum physics, systems biology, and ecology moving us away from the modern
age’s mechanistic view of nature to a renewed holism that
has reversed the relationship between
the parts and the whole. The properties
of the parts are not intrinsic properties but can be understood only within the
context of the larger whole. What we
call a part is merely a pattern in an inseparable web of relationships. Therefore, the shift from parts to the whole
can be seen as a shift from objects to relationships. A system is an integrated whole whose
essential properties arise from the relationships among its parts. Nature is an interlocking network of systems
. . . Nature is more flow than fixed.[3]
In the beginning is the relationship, and reality is
relational all the way through and all the way down. It’s all about relationship. It isn’t that you and I form
relationships. It is that relationships
form us. And God is the relation of all
relations, the depth dimension of reality uniting humanity and the cosmos in an
emergent, evolving, dynamic system of systems ordered and energized by love.
Ilia Delio writes that
Evolution unveils a depth of integrated
wholeness that is open to more unity, centricity, and consciousness. Love is not sheer emotion or simply a
dopaminergic surge in the limbic system; it is much more deeply embedded in the
fabric of the universe. Love is the
integrated energy field, the center of all centers, the whole of every whole,
that makes each whole desire more wholeness.
While love-energy may not explicitly show itself on the level of the
pre-living and non-reflective, it is present inchoately as the unifying
principle of wholeness as entities evolve toward greater complexity. “But even among the molecules,” Teilhard [de
Chardin] wrote, “Love was the building power that worked against entropy and
under its attraction the elements groped their way towards union.” Love-energy marks the history of the
universe.[4]
The new science is aligning with a new religious
consciousness in the reimaging of the primordial and perennial trinitarian
tradition of reality as Spirit-Matter-Consciousness. In this vision,
“Everything that exists, any real
being, presents this triune constitution expressed in three dimensions . . .
The cosmotheandric intuition is not a tripartite division among beings, but an
insight into the threefold core of all that is insofar as it is.”[5]
The Christian symbol of the Trinity is a particular expression
of the universal experience of reality as trinitarian, expressed differently in
the symbols of other cultures. It is a
vision of reality whose source, end, and energy is love. It is a vision we desperately need to reclaim.
As that part of the universe which has become
self-conscious, we humans have become responsible for a “cultural selection”
that operates in addition to natural selection to decisively affect the
evolution of love on earth. We can
choose to align ourselves with the truth of the Trinitarian vision through the
cultivation of Christ-consciousness in ourselves: the realization of our deep
interconnection with, and responsibility for, life in the cosmos.
Constance Fitzgerald argues that
Our ability to embody our communion
with every human person on the earth and our unassailable connectedness with
everything living is limited because . . . we continue to privilege our
personal autonomy and are unable to make the transition from radical
individualism to a genuine synergistic community even though we know
intellectually we are inseparably and physically connected to every living
being in the universe. Yet the future of
the entire earth community is riding on whether we can find a way beyond the
limits of our present evolutionary trajectory.[6]
What is required is a deep surrender of the ego in trust
that God’s power, the power of love, is working through us. We are invited to participate in the next
great evolutionary leap, at the spirit level, the level of consciousness, in
which we grow into the fullness of Christ.
Fitzgerald goes on to say that
The evolution of spirit or
consciousness . . . happens not just or mainly through physical propagation but
through a spiritual one in which people “bear fruit by virtue of the atmosphere
which radiates from them on their environment and . . . also by means of the
works which they produce in common and through which they propagate their
spirit. This idea of spiritual
generativity may sound far-fetched or ungrounded, until we consider what
scientists are discovering and speculating about the true nature of our
world. For example, as long ago as 1982
it was reported that “under certain circumstances sub-atomic particles such as
electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of
the distance separating them, whether an inch, 100 feet, or 10 billion miles
apart.” Scientist David Bohm’s explanation: there is a deeper and more complex level of
reality than we experience, an “implicate order or unbroken wholeness” from
which all our perceived reality derives.
If such a fabric of interconnectedness exists in nature, it is no
stretch of the imagination to apply it to consciousness. Genuine contemplatives have testified to this
long before scientists.[7]
We can experience this deeper and more complex level of
reality, “because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy
Spirit that has been given to us.”[8] It is our hope and our responsibility. May the Spirit of truth that Jesus promised
lead us into all truth and to the fullness of the Trinitarian vision.[9]
[1]
David S. Cunningham, These Three Are One: The Practice of Trinitarian Theology (Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers, 1998), p. 62.
[2]
Ibid, pp. 59-65.
[3] Ilia Delio, The
Unbearable Wholeness of Being (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2018), p. 32.
[4] Ibid, p. 44.
[5] Raimon Panikkar, Christophany:
The Fullness of Man (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004), p. xii.
[6] Fitzgerald, “From Impasse to Prophetic Hope: Crisis
of Memory,” CTSA PROCEEDINGS 64 (2009), p. 38.
[7] Ibid, p. 41.
[8] Romans 5:5
[9]
John 16:13.
