When the Trinity Becomes Four

Being the week of Pentecost, Deacon Gay and I were talking about the difficulty of trying to explain the work of the Spirit of God. The explanation, she said, is found in the story. She said that this week she was with one of our parishioners during the final days of her life. On her visit to this person’s home, the family unexpectedly gathered around the bed for communion. Gay said she could feel the presence of the Spirit of God as she shared the bread and wine with these people. It was a mystical moment that defied words, but the experience was shaping her life in such a way that it demanded she tell the story. Later, Deacon Gay had the opportunity to tell this story to the women at Perryville. In the context of a life of so many deaths and so few resurrections, the women of Perryville were deeply touched by the movement of the Spirit of God in Gay’s life.

Within a few days, the person Gay had visited, died. As I talked with the family, one of them recounted the story of sharing communion. With tears in their eyes, they told me how meaningful this experience had been for them. The Spirit of God seems to be at work in those moments when we are the most vulnerable and willing to take the greatest risks; when the veil between life and death are the thinnest.

Deacon Gay’s story made me reflect on my own encounters with the Spirit. I thought of those times when I’ve sat with parents who were grieving the loss of a child; those times when words are meaningless and only tears have voice in the conversation of silence. I thought of those times when I was discerning a life changing decision; those times when the mere thought of the options brought on a migraine. I thought of those times when I had to sit with my own grief and I couldn’t distinguish between the waves of anger, depression, and honest grief. In each of those times, the Spirit of God appeared in a variety of ways—a singing wind chime, a subtle breeze, the innocent question from a child, a voice spoken from the dead. The Spirit of God speaks in the ways we are open to hear; but only if we are willing to listen and then act.

The Spirit of God is the interplay, between God the Creator and Jesus the Christ. To use Richard Rohr’s words—the Creator, the Christ, and the Spirit are involved in an ongoing Divine Dance into which we are invited to participate.

Cynthia Bourgeault expanded Rohr’s idea of the Divine Dance with her explanation of the “Law of Three.” This law of the Universe states that the interweaving of three agencies always produces a fourth, which is then displayed in a new dimension. In other words, when God the Creator, Jesus the Christ, and the Spirit of God are harmoniously at work in our lives, something new, a fourth, will emerge in an unimaginable way, the new dimension.

Let’s use Deacon Gay’s story as an example. There was some backstory to the event. Gay told me that on the way to visit the person, she got lost. She was running thirty minutes late and worried about finding her way. The spouse of the dying person called to ask if she was still going to come to their house. Gay could have gotten embarrassed, or frustrated, or given up, or tried to reschedule, but she didn’t—she trusted that this was “the time” she needed to be at this person’s home. Arriving late, she was told that most of the family had left in order to provide some private time for Gay to visit the dying person. But because she had been late, the family returned within a few minutes.
This window of vulnerability opened the way for the Spirit of God to engage everyone present in a deeply spiritual experience. The interweaving of God the Creator’s call on Gay’s life as a deacon, her willingness to follow Jesus the Christ even though she was embarrassed about being late, and the Spirit’s movement in the life of this family who were open to share communion across their various denominational differences, produced a fourth agency in a new dimension—that fourth was a healing experience in the life of a family that was facing death and now grief.

This story is a microcosm of the biblical story; a story about God being in relationship with all of creation. The biblical story of Jesus reveals to us that this relationship between God and creation is oddly reliant upon human interaction. The Spirit of God, then, is the provocateur, the straw that stirs the drink, the bag that holds the tea in the hot water, the pot that keeps the soup on the stove, the needle that weaves the fabric of the interaction between God the Creator, Jesus the Christ, and us.

You and I are capable of being in the Divine Dance with the Holy Trinity. But to be in the dance, we have to be willing to participate and be consciously aware of the opportunities as they present themselves to us.

Jesus is the model for how to live our life this way. He was the most consciously aware human being to walk the earth. In his consciousness, he knew that death to the ego would create a resurrected new True Self, which will be lived in unity with God.

To model Jesus, we must take up our own cross in order to find our own moment of resurrection. Death to our ego, death to our agenda, death to our embarrassment, death to our expectations, death to our demands, death to our beliefs, death to our illusion of being in control—these deaths must happen on our own cross in order for us to be open to the resurrection movement of the Spirit of God in our life.

God will not force the way of Jesus on us. God will not operate unilaterally. The Spirit of God will not make something happen singularly. We must be willing to participate in the Divine Dance. Jesus the Christ’s power in death was resurrected in the life of his disciples, who willingly became his agents in the world. He breathed the power of the Spirit into their lives. And they took that breath deep into their souls.

The breath of the Spirit of God brings a power so great that the disciples could hold the raw naked fire of forgiveness. But, being given the agency of the Spirit of God comes with a warning: Danger, you might find yourself holding someone else’s demonic snake and it will only let go of you if you grant both the person and the demon forgiveness. The only way to activate the Spirit of God is to love so much that you can let go of control; to forgive so much you’ve forgotten the sin; to empty yourself so much you’ve crawled up on your own cross to die to your ego. The fire of the Spirit of God does not move accidentally nor without purpose and not without a human agent that is willing to follow the path of the Christ.

To be actively involved in the Divine Dance we must open ourselves to the difficult process of becoming spiritually mature human beings. We must work toward becoming as consciously awake as was Jesus. How? By, opening our spiritual eyes to see the creative action of God that is still taking place in the world today. By opening our spiritual hands to receive the nail prints of the Christ when we risk being his servants. And by opening our mouths to receive the breath of Spirit of God into our very souls. By living into these spiritual actions, we will find ourselves involved in the intoxicating dance with the One Holy Living Trinitarian God, where three will become four.