The Divine DanceSample

Face-to-Face

It is very hard to talk about spiritual things in a totally objective or external way. It’s very hard to talk about an inner experience because, frankly, if you haven’t been there, you haven’t been there. If you don’t desire to mirror others, you probably haven’t been effectively mirrored yourself. And the Divine Mirror is what James calls “the perfect law of freedom” (James 1:25) because it reflects us with a totally liberating love and acceptance.

Perhaps one of the greatest weaknesses of institutional religion is that we’ve given people the impression that the pope could know for us, or the experts could know for us, or the Bible could know for us—that we could have second-hand knowledge of holy things, and could be really invested in the sacred because someone else told us it was true. God ended up being an outer “thing” and largely remained out there, extraneous to the experience of the soul, the heart, and even the transformed mind. Yet God has no grandchildren, only children.

Thus, we tried to know God through objectified knowledge, which finally became a boring facsimile of knowledge because we weren’t in on the deal; it was literally outside us and beyond us. This is much of organized religion.

Humans get excited about something only if it includes them in some way. God surely knew this about us, and so God included us inside of God’s own knowing—by planting the Holy Spirit within us as the Inner Knower and Reminder of “all things.” (See John 14:26.) This is indeed a re-minding, a very different kind of mind that is given to us!

But it gets even better: we know and accept ourselves in the very same movement in which we’re knowing and accepting God; in surrendering to God, we simultaneously accept our best and fullest self. What a payoff! What a truly holy exchange! And it’s all accomplished in the process of mirroring. 

The doctrine of Trinity says that it’s finally participatory knowledge that matters, not rational calculating, which is but one limited form of knowing. God—and the human person by an irreducibly important extension—must never be objectified. In fact, God refuses to be an object of our thinking. As John of the Cross so frequently insisted, God refuses to be known but can only be loved.

God can only be loved and enjoyed, which ironically ends up being its own new kind of knowing. This is absolutely central and pivotal.

If a loving Creator started this whole thing, then there has to be a “DNA connection,” as it were, between the One who creates and what is created. One of the many wonderful things that scientists are discovering as they compare their observations through microscopes with those through telescopes is that the pattern of the neutrons, protons, and atoms is similar to the pattern of planets, stars, and galaxies: both are in orbit, and all are relational to everything else. We now know the same is true in biology, as Robert Lanza’s work on biocentrism so brilliantly demonstrates: “the universe is created by life and not the other way around.”

There is a similarity between the perceived two ends of the universe, the Divine and the human, just as we should have expected: “Let us create in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves” is how Genesis first described the Creator speaking. (See Genesis 1:26.) 

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! Whatever is going on in God is a flow, a radical relatedness, a perfect communion between Three—a circle dance of love.

This is where all the power for infinite renewal is at work:

The loving relationship between them.

The infinite love between them.

The dance itself.

In other words, it is an entirely relational universe. If, at any time, we try to stop this flow moving through us, with us, and in us, we fall into the true state of sin—and it is truly a state more than a momentary behavior.

Sin is the state of being closed down, shut off, blocked, and thus resisting the eternal flow that we’re meant to be. By a hardened heart or a cold spirit, by holding another person apart in hatred, you’ve thus cut yourself off from the flow. Jesus, therefore, criticizes the religious leaders who want to condemn the woman caught in adultery much more than the woman herself. Jesus’ words to the murderous, religious bean counters in John 8 forever stand as a rather wholesale critique of all stone-throwing, and they locate sin where we would rather not see it.

The divine flow either flows both in and out or it is not flowing at all. The Law of Flow is simple, and Jesus states it in many formulations, such as “Happy are the merciful; they shall have mercy shown to them.” (See Matthew 5:7.)

Sin is always a refusal of mutuality and a closing down into separateness. In his classic The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis has the soul in hell shouting out, “I don’t want help. I want to be left alone.” Whenever we refuse mutuality toward anything…whenever we won’t allow our deep inner-connectedness to guide us…whenever we’re not attuned to both receiving and giving…you could say that the Holy Spirit is existentially absent from our lives. (Not essentially, however.) True evil and true sin must be very well disguised to survive. Separation will normally not look like sin, but will often resemble propriety and even appropriate boundary-keeping.