The following is an excerpt from The Great Open Dance by Jon Paul Sydnor. It’s a featured Speakeasy selection, and there are still limited review copies available for qualified reviewers.
Agape unites the three persons into one God. In the Trinity, three persons make one God, just as in music, three tones make one chord. The tones within a chord are united by their underlying mathematics. Each tone has a frequency, and those frequencies will create different effects depending on how they overlap. The tones flow through one another, so that their uniqueness can be discerned but not separated. Similarly, the persons within the Trinity are united by their shared love, a love so perfect that the three persons become one God. In Greek, the word for this divine love is agape (ah-GAHP-ay). Agape refers to the love between the persons of God, the love that God has for humankind, and the love that humans are called to share with one another. Agape is a perfect love, unconditional and universal. As such, we must distinguish it from all the transactional loves that characterize human life: from familial and tribal love (Greek: storge) that grants us security and protection, from the brotherly love (Greek: philos) that is of benefit to both parties, and from the erotic love (Greek: eros) that brings pleasure to both parties. Agape is not against these other loves, but agape completes them by divinizing them, by bringing them plumb with the grain of the universe.
Christianity, as an outgrowth of Judaism, has always identified itself as a monotheistic religion, worshiping one God and one God alone. Although the tradition has been soundly Trinitarian for a millennium and a half, some Christians deny that three unique persons can comprise one God. They argue that such a belief would constitute tritheism—the worship of three different gods. In their view, tritheism is a form of polytheism that rejects worship of the one God and is, therefore, heretical.
However, Christianity has also taught that the love of God is infinitely more perfect than the love of human for human. Therefore, if humans can achieve a love that erases the boundaries between persons, God should be able to as well. Hal and Janice were two parishioners in a former church, married for 60 years. They had an extremely loving relationship, one of those rare near-perfect marriages—unfailing kindness toward one another, patience with each other’s foibles, continual gratitude and mutual praise. In his mid-80s, Hal got sick and, after a three month fight, died. Janice was devastated.
I was having lunch with Janice a few months later. When I asked her about life without Hal, she smiled gently, looked slightly befuddled, and said that she felt like “half a person”. She wasn’t whole once separated from Hal. She no longer felt complete. Her self was lacking. Janice’s statement was both tragic and wonderful; tragic because she was in such pain, wonderful because she had known such love. She was saying that the two of them had become one, so that when one of the two was lost, the one who was left only felt like a half. They had a nondual relationship, being both two and one. They had a trinitarian relationship, being united by agapic love, which had completed their familial, friendly, and erotic love.
Crucially, this union was predicated upon their difference, not their sameness. Janice and Hal did not fall in love or continually deepen their love because they saw themselves in each other. They loved one another because they saw someone different in each other. They were attracted to one another’s uniqueness, not sameness. Certainly, they shared values, ideals, and goals that made their marriage work. But neither saw the other as an extension or reflection of the self. They saw each other as free selves, deeply united.
Janice and Hal’s relationship achieved divine unity because neither sought to protect any aspect of themselves from the other. Using Nagarjuna’s language, they practiced openness, and found their greatest joy in that openness. Conversely, Hal and Janice denied their svabhava, which we can here translate as separate-being or self-sufficiency. In this telling, svabhava refers to a withdrawn portion of the soul, an invulnerable hardness in the psyche that shallows our relationships. Nagarjuna asserts that it does not exist in truth, but that our craving for it—our fear of vulnerability—conjures its illusion. And that illusion causes our self-assertion, self-obsession, and ultimately our self-suffering, all of which spread like a disease.
If Janice and Hal can achieve unity through love, if two humans can become one couple, then certainly the trinitarian God—Parent, Child, and Spirit—should be able to do the same. To deny God the best human capacity would be bad theology. For this reason, accusations of tritheism against Trinitarians do not hold water. God is three persons united through agapic love into one nondual community. God is agapic nonduality. Recognizing love as the basis for all Christian thought, Catherine Mowry Lacugna concludes, “The doctrine of the Trinity, in one form or another, is the sine qua non for preserving the essentially relational character of God, the relational nature of human existence, and the interdependent quality of the entire universe.”
The persons of the Trinity relate to one another in a divine dance. When they were younger, Janice and Hal loved to dance. Interestingly, much like the teachers of openness have illustrated their concept through the metaphor of Indra’s web, the teachers of the Trinity have illustrated their concept through the metaphor of dance. When a skilled couple dances you cannot detect who is leading. There is no compulsion. Their movements appear spontaneously generated. Each defers to the other to produce perfectly synchronized action, action so spontaneous that it embodies freedom. So it is with the Trinity. They dance freely, spontaneously, always in relation to one another but never determined by one another, co-originating one another in joyful mutuality. Dance creates beauty out of motion and grace out of time. Dance renders impermanence playful. The unique motions of the dancers unite to form the one harmony, so that the sum is greater than the parts. Interactions are spontaneous, the product of trust, attentiveness, and communion.
We, being made in the image of God, are made to dance—with God, with one another, and with the cosmos. In other words, our being is invited into God’s dance, and God’s dance is invited into our being. Just as importantly, we are called to share God’s dance with one another, to relate to one another freely and joyfully, spontaneously effecting one another. The energy of this love feels inexhaustible. Without the hindrance of obstinate self-assertion, energy multiplies itself exponentially. An unexpected quantity of joy arises, which is the experience of grace. But all of this can only occur if we first empty ourselves of any grasping self.
Once the open dance begins there is no coercion. Autonomy is not lost, but it is surpassed as the dancer’s movements become interdependent with their partners’, and vice versa. This interdependence does not involve control since the partners fluidly co-originate each other’s movements, embodying joyful freedom in spontaneous relationship. The dance expresses mutuality; it proves that many can dance together more gracefully, joyfully, and spontaneously than one can dance alone.
Praise for The Great Open Dance
“I love this book! Jon Paul Sydnor offers an open and agapic vision whose specifics I sometimes agreed with, sometimes disagreed with, and often learned something new. Thanks to it, I finally understand what Sydnor means by nonduality. But what I liked most was Sydnor’s insistence on the centrality of love. This is a progressive Christian theology for the head and heart!”
—Thomas Jay Oord, Author of Pluriform Love
“The Great Open Dance is a lucid testimony to a Christian faith that journeys through our world with its eyes wide open to all the good and bad around and within us. Jon Paul Sydnor brings a lifetime of learning, living, and loving to his reflections, yet he keeps his account light and inviting, accessible to a wide range of readers. His views on Christ, the church, and the faith are quite strong and pointed, but always presented with real charity, for the good of persons and communities of faith today.”
—Francis X. Clooney, SJ, Professor of Divinity, Harvard University
“Engaging gender-expansive language, emergent understandings of the universe, vital inter-religious conversations, and the complex Christian theological inheritance, Jon Paul Sydnor presents a fresh, confident vision that will surely shape a generation of progressive Christian thinkers.”
—Michelle Voss, Professor of Theology, Emmanuel College, Toronto School of Theology
About the Author
Jon Paul Sydnor is Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Emmanuel College, theologian-in-residence at Grace Community Boston, and a podcaster at The Progressive Sacred. He studied at the University of Virginia, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Boston College, where he received his PhD. He practices theology in conversation with other religions, especially Hinduism and Buddhism, whose concept of nondualism has highly influenced the trinitarian theology of this book.
I encourage reviewers to get this book. I’m rereading it because it has so many gems!