It has been observed somewhere or other that it is impossible to preach about the Trinity for longer than fifteen minutes without falling into heresy. I have not timed Fr Matt Gunter's essay, which appears in full on Into the Expectation, but I am confident that heresy-hunters will be disappointed. Special greetings on this Trinity Sunday to all members of churches named after this puzzling yet vital dogma.

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...before and beyond and within all creation God is a dance, God is a friendship dance. From all eternity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit dance the dance of love and truth and joy. God is a dynamic dance of mutual giving and receiving and delighting. As they sought language to point toward an understanding of God as Trinity, the early Christian theologians used the Greek word perichoresis, which means something like "they dance around together".

...The triune nature of God is one of the central mysteries of Christianity. But mystery is not the same as conundrum. Nor is it the result of a presumptuous desire to explain more than can be explained...[The Cappadocians of the 4th century] argued that all we can really know of God is what God has revealed in Jesus and the Holy Spirit. What God is beyond that is unknowable. We do not use trinitarian language for God out of presumption. It is just that, as Rowan Williams has said, "It is the least worst language for God we have".

...The doctrine of the Trinity is also good news because it means there is room for otherness. If there is "space" within God for the Son to be other than the Father, and the Spirit to be other than the Father and the Son, then there is space for us to be other than God. God makes space for creation and for us in it. Understanding God as Trinity means understanding God as involved in, but not overwhelming, everything. There is room for real freedom. We can celebrate our unity and diversity, not as a contemporary cliche', but as a reflection of what it means to be created in the image of God. God is one, but one in whom there is intimate otherness.

Irenaeus was born in Smyrna, Asia Minor. His dates are uncertain but he somehow migrated to Gaul, where he eventually became the bishop of Lyons. He is known mainly for his work Against Heresies (ca 180), in which he defends a fairly mature orthodox faith against Gnosticism and other "alternative" explanations of Christianity. The excerpt below, dealing with the theological interpretation of Pentecost, describes the action of the Holy Spirit using a moisture metaphor instead of the more customary wind image.

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This is why the Lord had promised to send the Advocate: he was to prepare us as an offering to God. Like dry flour, which cannot become one lump of dough, one loaf of bread, without moisture, we who are many could not become one in Christ Jesus without the water that comes down from heaven. And like parched ground, which yields no harvest unless it receives moisture, we who were once like a waterless tree could never have lived and borne fruit without this abundant rainfall from above. Through the baptism that liberates us from change and decay we have become one in body; through the Spirit we have become one in soul.

Julian of Norwich (1342-1416) lived for many years as an anchoress or solitary in a church in Norwich, England. At the age of 30 she had fallen very ill and had experienced a series of visions, which she later recorded in Revelations of Divine Love (numerous editions), the first book in Middle English by a woman. Today being Julian's feastday as well as the day before Mothers' Day, we honor both with passages from her book describing God's love in strikingly maternal terms that are perhaps even more relevant today. They may be found here on the website of the Anglican Order of Julian of Norwich.

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57. Our Savior is our true Mother in whom we are endlessly born and never shall come to birth out of Him.

58. ...The Second Person of the Trinity is our Mother in human nature in our essential creation. In Him we are grounded and rooted, and He is our Mother in mercy by taking on our fleshliness. And thus our Mother is to us various kinds of actions (in Whom our parts are kept unseparated) for in our Mother Christ, we benefit and grow, and in mercy He redeems and restores us, and, by the virtue of His Passion and His death and resurrection, He ones us to our essence. In this way, our Mother works in mercy to all His children who are submissive and obedient to Him.

59. As truly as God is our Father, so truly God is our Mother...I understood three ways of looking at motherhood in God: the first is the creating of our human nature; the second is His taking of our human nature (and ther commences the Motherhood of grace); the third is motherhood of action (and in that is a great reaching outward, by the same grace, of length and breadth and of height and depth without end) and all is one love.

60. The mother can give her child such from her milk, but our precious Mother Jesus can feed us with Himself; and He does it most graciously and most tenderly with the Blessed Sacrament which is the Precious Food of true life. And with all the sweet Sacraments He supports us most mercifully and graciously.

Today being the third anniversary of this blog, I revisit the concept of theosis, which was the subject of our very first post. Theosis lies at the center of Eastern Christian theology and spirituality, but is by no means restricted to that tradition. In a very useful essay on the Jesuit site Ignatius Insight, Carl E Olson points out a number of places in which theosis is alluded to in Catechism of the Catholic Church (Doubleday 1994), the definitive statement of Roman Catholic dogmatic teaching.

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460. The Word became flesh to make us "partakers of the divine nature"(2Pet 1:4): "For this is why the Word became man, and the Son of God became the Son of man: so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of God (Irenaeus)..."The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods" (Athanasius).

654. Justification...brings about filial adoption so that men become Christ's brethren...We are brethren not by nature, but by the gift of grace, because that adoptive filiation gains us a real share in the life of the only Son, which was fully revealed in his Resurrection.

1996. Our justification come from the grace of God. Grace is favor, the free and undeserved help that God gives us to respond to his call to become children of God, adoptive sons, partakers of the divine nature and of eternal life.

2009. Filial adoption, in making us partakers by grace in the divine nature, can bestow true merit on us as a result of God's gratuitous justice. This is our right by grace, the full right of love, making us "co-heirs" with Christ and worthy of obtaining "the promised inheritance of eternal life" (Council of Trent). The merits of our good works are gifts of the divine goodness. "Grace has gone before us; now we are given what is due...Our merits are God's gifts" (Augustine).

Slightly in advance of Earth Day, I share two writings dealing with the subject of God/Christ in the created world. The first is from a book by Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, The Beginning of the Day. It comes from Fr Stephen's blog, which gets a well-deserved hat-tip. The other excerpt is from Ilia Delio's Christ in Evolution (Maryknoll, Orbis, 2008), pp 61-62. Delio is a Franciscan sister and professor of spirituality at Washington Theological Union. In this passage she refers to the work of the medieval Franciscan theologian St Bonaventure.

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Kallistos

...recall with me how every part of the created order played a part in the story of Christ's life and death:
* a star appeared at his birth (Matt 2:9-10)
*an ox and ass stood beside his crib as he lay in swaddling clothes (cf Is 1:30)
* during the forty days of his temptation in the wilderness he was with the wild beasts (Mark 1:13)
* repeatedly he spoke of himself as a sheperd, and of his disciples as sheep (Lk 15:3-7; Matt 18:10-14; John 10:1-16)
* he likened his love for Jerusalem to the maternal love of a hen for her chicks (Matt:23-37)
* he taught that every sparrow is precious in the sight of God the Father (Matt 10:29)
* he illustrated his parables with references to the lillies (Matt 6: 28-30), to the mustard bush full of nesting birds (Mark 4:32), to a domestic animal that has fallen into a pit on the Sabbath day (Matt 12:11)
* he urged us to show reptilian subtlety and avian guilelessness; "Be wise as serpents and innocent as doves" (Matt 10:16)
* as Lord of creation he stilled the storm (Mark 4:35-41) and walked upon water (Mark 6:45-51).

Most noteworthy of all, the created order in its entirety participated in the Savior's passion: the earth shook, the rocks were split, the whole cosmos shuddered (Matt 27:51).

Delio

In every creature, the first person of the Trinity is reflected as the power that holds the creature in being. The second person is reflected as the Wisdom or the Exemplar by which it is created. The third person is reflected as the goodness that will bring the creature to its consummation. The difference in these levels of of expression reflects the degree of similarity between the creature and creator. The trace (or vestige) is the most distant reflection of God and is found in all creatures. That is, every grain of sand, every star, every earthworm reflects the Trinity as its origin, its reason for existence, and the end to which it is destined. The image, however, is only found in intellectual (human) beings. It reflects the fact that the human person is created not only according to the image of the Trinity, but as image, the human person is capable of union with the divine. Bonaventure says that those humans conformed to God by grace bear a likeness to God. In his view, every creature is understood as an aspect of God's self-expression in the world, and since every creature has its foundation in the Word, each is equally close to God (although the mode of relationship differs). God is profoundly present to all things, and God is expressed in all things, so that each creature is a symbol and a sacrament of God's presence and Trinitarian life. The world is created as a means of God's self-revelation so that, like a mirror or footprint, it might lead us to love and praise the creator. We are created to read the book of creation so that we may know the Author of Life. This book of creation is an expression of who God is and is meant to lead humans to what it signifies, namely, the eternal Trinity of dynamic, self-diffusive love.

With the approach of Earth Day we turn our attention to how our contemplative practice intersects with the material world--not that we shouldn't be thinking of this constantly in any event. Today I revisited Dennis Patrick Slattery's Grace in the Desert (Jossey-Bass 2004), his account of a sabbatical visiting various monasteries and retreat houses. The first stop on his itinerary was the monastery of New Camaldoli, a Camaldolese Benedictine foundation near Big Sur, California. Having stayed there once, I can attest to the ease with which one can interact with the local flora and fauna. The part about the coyotes howling in response to the monastery bells is really true. The excerpts are found on pp 14, 16, 17, and 18.

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...I noticed something astir in my little fence-enclosed backyard.

Two foxes lay lazily and with great familiarity beneath the gray weathered benches. They seemed to doze lightly as they gazed indifferently at me now standing by the back door. Their large and fluffed tails rivaled the size of their bodies. They lay very close together--apparently, like me, prepared to settle in for the night. I felt both delighted and honored that they had chosen my little hermitage green space to bed down in, and I felt strangely safer by their presence. I thought of these two foxes, which became permanent hermitage mates of mine during my week's stay, and thereafter I looked for them each night as I prepared to turn off the lights. Apparently they too enjoyed the arrangement, for they were present each day of my entire stay...

...Even this early, my monastic foxes, who lived just over the edge of the cliff but slept in my backyard, were already stirring. One of them peered, head bobbing and nose alert and twitching, through the back door to see if I was awake and perhaps even ready to feed them. The only nourishment they received from me was a silent salute each morning.

In their early friskiness they leaped onto the wooden fence and began their ritual promenade, back and forth, slowly gathering momentum, as if they literally wound themselves up in an accelerated dervish dance for the day's hunt. I knew they had been schooled by the order of life here and thus practiced a learned monkish patience. They did not press their claim for food too insistently...

The bell summoning us to Vigils suddenly sounded, cracking the monastery open to a new day. The coyotes in the mountains surrounding me on three sides and just behind the chapel responded with their own litany from the deep and brittle-dry forest thickets. They too waited to be called, if only to sing.

Bartholomew, Patriarch of Constantinople and world leader of Eastern Orthodoxy, issues a circular letter each Easter that is read in all Orthodox churches. Since Easter falls on the same day for both the Eastern and Western churches this year, we reproduce part of it (available in full here) below.

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...Christ has risen from the tomb as divinely human and humanity has risen with him! The tyranny of death belongs to the past. The hopelessness of hades' captivity has irrevocably gone. The only powerful Giver of Life, having through His Incarnation voluntarily assumed all of the misfortune of our nature and all that it entails, namely death, has already "brought death to hades by the lightning of divinity", granting us life--and "life in abundance" (John 10:10).

...The devil assaults Life by means of the sinful tendency that exists within us like "old rust", using this to entrap us in either tangible sin or delusional belief. Hubris is the offspring of that "rust", while both comprise the sinister couple responsible for disrupting relationships within ourselves, with others, as well as with God and the whole creation. Accordingly, it is imperative that we purify ourselves of this rust with great attentiveness and carefulness in order that the profuse life-giving light of the Risen Christ may shine in our mind, soul and body, so that it may in turn dispel the darkness of hubris and pour the "abundance" of Life to all the world.

This cannot be achieved by philosophy, science, technology, art, or any ideology; it can only be achieved through faith in what God has condescended for us human beings through His Passion, Crucifixion and Burial, descending to the depths of hades and rising from the dead as the divine human Jesus Christ. It is also expressed in the sacramental life of the Church as well as through laborious and systematic spiritual struggle. The Church as the Body of Christ unceasingly and to the ages experiences the miracle of the Resurrection; through its sacred mysteries, its theology and its practical teachings, it offers us the possibility of participating in that miracle of sharing in the victory over death, of becoming children shaped by the light of the Resurrection and truly "partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4).