Branches Spread Along the Path
‘The Harrowing of Hell‘ by Evan Dahm
I took a stroll around Beaver Lake at dusk last night, her sylvan orbit still strewn with remnants of Hurricane Helene’s signature debris. It’s been barely six months since the storm’s path of torrential devastation cut through my mountain home. The beauty of a temperate Asheville spring twilight contrasted bitterly with the pollen like cement in my eyes, the tree limbs interrupting my steps; I felt this atmosphere in my chest as a kind of Gethsemane anxiety — a heavy grief at what still lay dying around us while new life attempts to break through.
How do we harness the energies of everyday resurrection in our lives today?
It begins again in the dark.
A tomb. A tear. A trembling.
A trap we’ve faced before.
Each Holy Week — that inflection point where Jesus’ message of evolutionary, revolutionary Love clashes decisively with the totalizing forces of death-dealing colonization — we’re invited to trade the easier nostalgia for a steeper, braver path of initiation.
This fast-turned-feast, observed in one form or fashion by a third of the planet’s population, is often misunderstood: Lent isn’t about rote reenactment, but instead reentry into this archetypal story. To once again taste and see the Mystery that undoes history.
We stand again on the brink of empire and wonder, of state-sponsored violence and strange quickening.
Days like Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday echo our ache—political venom, ecological collapse, and spiritual drift, sounding a minor chord amid the reflexive-reenactment rush-to-Sunday alleluias.
Holy Week doesn’t arrive soft; it’s a blade. The unlikely Messiah from Nazereth didn’t die for milquetoast moralism, and certainly not for the inverted so-called ‘values’ of blood and soil. His life — a blaze of love, justice, and defiance — ignited the monoculture’s fear, and so the monoculture snuffed it out.
At least, they thought they did.
The first Pascha — observed in English and German languages as Easter — tremorred beneath the boot of Rome’s attempts at control; today’s alliances of power and profit are no less formidable.
But in this intimate dusk, a strange invitation highlights almost incandescently on our horizon: that even now, something new can be co-created with the animate forces that intend our good. From Appalachia to Golgotha, I’m reminded that we’re invited to mountains of mystery — to die before we die and thus awaken to a new life, even as the world-as-we’ve-known-it falls apart.
We’re invited to credible hope – hope with dirt under its nails, born from the compost of crisis but reaching toward resurrection.
The Law of Three: A Hidden Trinity of Transformation
The drama unfolds as it always has:
A Teacher. A Table. A Towel.
A betrayal, a beating, a burial.
Georgij Ivanovičh Gurdjieff
The enigmatic mystic G.I. Gurdjieff’s lived in a century just before ours, unfolding across earlier fault lines of empire and revolution—from his family’s flight from Ottoman persecution to near-fatal gunshot wounds during geopolitical uprisings to escape from the Russian Civil War, the ravages of the Great War to survival in Nazi-occupied Paris. War was both outer ordeal and inner fire, shaping his mission to awaken humanity from the mass hypnosis that makes violence possible.
In the midst of his lifelong quest to find value amid life’s suffering, Gurdjieff saw something important about Jesus:
Real love is the basis of all, the foundations, the Source. The religions have perverted and deformed love. It was by love that Jesus performed miracles. Real love joined with magnetism. All accumulated vibrations create a current. This current brings the force of love. Real love is a cosmic force which goes through us. If we crystallize it, it becomes a power — the greatest power in the world. (from Meetings at 6 rue des Colonels-Renard, Paris (1941-46), page 96)
How do we make room to encouter this real love, and the new life it generates? Life’s genuine resurrections — new arisings — often come from threes. At least, that’s one of the central ideas of Gurdjieff’s approach to inner work and outer impact.
Growing up with an Ashokh (storyteller) father at a geo-spiritual crossroads and learning in childhood and young adulthood from Orthodox monastics, Sufi shaykhs, and Yogic masters of bodily rigors, Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way seeks to harmonize mind, heart, and body to recieve and generate a coherent everyday vitality on a planet where conflict isn’t a bug — it’s a feature, whose unwieldy energies belong in the grand scheme of things, available for the curation of evolutionary, revolutionary momentum for our common flourishing.
Gurdjieff proposes that every creation, every new arising, results from The Law of Three (which he tongue-twistingly names Triamazikamno): the interplay of three forces: Holy-Affirming, Holy-Denying, and Holy-Reconciling.
I appreciate Episcopal priest and Fourth Way student Cynthia Bourgeault’s summary of this Law:
- In every new arising there are three forces involved: affirming, denying, and reconciling.
- The interweaving of the three produces a fourth in a new dimension.
- Affirming, denying, and reconciling are not fixed points or permanent essence attributes, but can and do shift and must be discerned situationally.
- Solutions to impasses or sticking points generally come by learning how to spot and mediate third force, which is present in every situation but generally hidden.
The poles and roles can change positions, depending on who initiates any given dance under consideration, and who responds. These aren’t “good vs. bad” forces, but a dynamic trinity. There is the affirming force – the yes, the creative impulse, the initiating energy. There is the denying force – the resistance, the no, the force of constraint or inertia.
These forces’ moral directionality isn’t inherently indicated by the seeming positivity or negativity of the terms themselves. Affirming can be tragic (like our neighbors being disappeared from our streets); Denying can be noble (like spiritual communities choosing to be literal sanctuaries for the dispossessed, with diminishing assurance as to their own safety). But what makes this more than a deadlocked Hegalian dialectic is the presence of a neutralizing or reconciling force — the mysterious third element that bridges and harmonizes the other two into a genuinely new result.
This Law of Three is a (if you’ll pardon the expression) Divine Dance at the heart of reality — and it resonates with the venerable (if strange) Christian intuition of God as Three-in-One, the Blessed Trinity.
As Cynthia Bourgeault notes in The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three, if we mistake affirming for “positive good” and denying for “obstacle to be eliminated,” we lose the transformative leverage of the third force.
In truth, all three are holy. The triadic unfolding is not a standoff between Light and Dark with God as referee; it’s a collaboration. Even the denying force (the crisis, the betrayal, the “No” we encounter) has a sacred role – it provides the tension and grounded reality that the affirming force needs in order to produce something new.
I think of this process as gritty nonduality — the transmoral exploration of precisely how everything belongs. Without resistance, no new muscle is grown; without the Cross, no Resurrection occurs.
The lead-up to Pascha or Easter can itself be read as a drama of the Law of Three:
On Good Friday, Divine love (Holy-Affirming) met human violence (Holy-Denying) — and for a moment it seemed like denial won as Jesus was lynched by a coalition of self-protecting religion and power-obsessed state control.
But in the tomb, unseen, a Third Force was at work. Call it Holy-Reconciling or as we named her in many a Pentecostal prayer meeting growing up, the Holy Ghost and Fire.
On Easter, Holy Reconciling reveals itself as the emergence of something utterly new:
Life reborn, an emergence beyond mere resuscitation. The polarities of life and death are transcended into a Third Phenomenon: Resurrection. The reconciling plane offers itself not only as a playing field for Divine action, but as an essential ingredient in the process.
Today’s crises of planet and people can be seen through this same trinocular vision:
Totalitarianism and ecological collapse may appear as negations (Second Force, or Denying) to everything we cherish — justice, peace, and the living biosphere herself. And it’s tempting to cast these negations as absolute evils to be vanquished. But what if we viewed them as the partner moving toward us, whom we must push against to take the next dance step?
Magnetized Love: New Arisings
Two forces wrestle.
The Third arrives unbidden.
What draws us together cannot be contained.
The octave completes itself in song.
Our First (or Affirming) Force could be our love for wise governance, for the Earth, for one another — an active force for good. The turmoil and backlash are the Denying Force, provoking us at every turn with their wicked dance-floor moves. If we stop with just these two, we remain locked in endless opposition, ping-ponging between hope and despair. But the Law of Three says: Look for the Third Force. Is there a reconciling energy emerging from this collision that will sweep even the most recalcitrant foes of embodied love off their feet?
Perhaps it is us – the awakening of a new level of consciousness, a creative response that wasn’t possible before.
As Richard Rohr reminds us, “The whole of creation—not just Jesus—is the beloved community, the partner in the divine dance.”
That means even these bleak moments of history belong in time’s repertoire; they can serve in the larger story being told. Our present moment’s Third Force might be a widespread realization of our interconnectivity, a grassroots groundswell of compassion, an inner alchemizing of just enough people on the planet – something surprising that transforms the energy of conflict into the reconciling energy of resurrection. As Richard and I wrote in The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation:
The greatest dis-ease facing humanity right now is our profound and painful sense of disconnection—disconnection from God, certainly, but also from ourselves (our bodies and True Selves), from each other, and from creation. We see this in political corruption, ecological devastation, war and violence, fearing and even hating each other because of our differences, whether race, religion, or sexual orientation. Our world needs to be reminded of our interdependence and our inherent union with what is.
[We] believe the Trinity can teach us how to live in creative collaboration, valuing and honoring our differences while also serving each other with humility and compassion.
Easter can, if we’re receptive to its graces, prepare us for new arising – the fruit of love and sacrifice reconciled. Where we allow the full weight of Affirming and Denying forces to be felt in our bodies, making room for something finer. One way Gurdjieff articulates the Law of Three is that “The Higher blends with the Lower to actualize the Middle.”
I have a hunch that the Third Force of Resurrection is already peeking through our soil, in seedling form. Let’s see if we can adjust our vision.
As a postscript, I can offer you no better Paschal audio-video meditation than Peter Gabriel and Mike Bennion’s just-released music video (drawing on, I suspect, many of the themes we’ve been exploring here), Before Night Falls:
Related posts:
Changing the World with Faith, Hope & Love: Ecology, Identity, Class & Solidarity in the Way of Jesus with Joerg Rieger!
Where the Trickster Meets the Angel: Animist Readings for Apocalyptic Times
Creator and Destroyer of Worlds: On God and Oppenheimer | Richard Rohr with Mike Morrell
Praying with Resurrection’s Fire: A Mary Magdalene Novena
I would challenge trinitarian theology, based Quantum Physics (and other modern science), Consciousness Studies (including NDEs and paranormal studies) and “clearly irrelevant” and thus ignored, history (including contradictions in the NT). The combination of these three fields of knowledge seem to indicate that our existent NT was purposely edited to conceal more than reveal. That Jews and Christians were united before the end of the 1st Jewish War. That all major religions, and most minor ones also, are based on the same experience of the divine and differ only because of cultural interpretations. And one final point, not the only one but the last I will post here, is that the problem of suffering/evil in the world exists only because we look through distorted eyes that see very dimly.
Regarding the Easter event, I do not see it as a matter of faith, but rather as a provable scientific fact, but one that has been distorted for political reasons, and whose power needs to be restored, especially in today’s global political situation. Currently I am struggling to express divinity in positive, 21st century terms as opposed to the traditional vague (Trinitarian, just what does that really mean?, and I have a M.Div. so I have studied it), negative (you cannot say it that way but almost never, that is a good explanation) 7th century (at most recent, much is far older) fashion most people are used to.
There are no new spiritual laws, Mike, just old wine in new bottles
What you and others refer to as the “divine dance,” is a matter of spiritual mechanics, the physics that allow those who see the oneness of all things can integrate, otherwise seen by ordinary awareness (separation consciousness) as separate, manifest in binary thinking. Separation consciousness is the bane of the the spiriutally unawakened and unelightened, and the affliction of most of humankind that even most religiouus have not overcome. Science and spirituality, and all dualities (siloed disciplines) are joined by a common element (a recconciled third), sometimes known as the “excluded middle,” the ‘narrow way’ or ‘strait gate’ Jesus referred to in Matthew 7 that “few find.” In that regard, nothing has changed in the postmodern era. Wisdom is still crying out in the streets, and goes begging for a few prepared hearts to receive it.
Spirituality is primarily about seeing and reconciling paradoxes (contraries) in what only appears as a binary arranged and created world to dualistic thought. In reality, creation is a semaless garment joined by a common universal element and always has been.
Such is visible only to unitive consciousness, a byproduct of spiritual awakening and enlightenment only.
As for the awakened, recall that in the OT and in Jesus time, as well as today, its always a remnat that have hace prepared hearts and eyes to receive thes hidden truths, those who “have not bowed a knee to Baal, kissed him, or wavered between two opinions” (1 Kings 18;21, 2 Kings 10:18).
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As for spiritual mechanics, the “two opinions” spoken of by Elijah refer to darkness and light, truth and deception, the single eye (3rd eye) and evil eye, or more specifically the “wheat and tares” Jesus used in the parable. He’s talking about lower and higher forms of energy here, counter-rotating energy and information fields in creation and within human consciousness whose opposing forces create the necessary heat and friction that are always the catalyst in both physical and metaphysical transformation and change — whether you’re talking about a chemistry lab and test tubes held over the flame over a burner, a soul agonizing in conflict or crises on the threhold of being squeezed throught the knothole of a spiritual breakthrough, or the global “groaning and travailing” via tribulation inducing birth pangs on the eve of his return. Same process, same energy, different level of the same law applied to either the physical, mental, or spiritual plane — the spiritual mechanics science is just beginning to wake up to.
Matter itself, said Einstein, is just frozen light energy, spirit moving (vibrating) slow enough to be seen.
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As for reconciling paradox with requisite eyes to appreciate rhe spiritual mechanics of it all, when Jesus returns it is likely that the friction/tension created between the wheat and tares (darkness and light) on the earth will have reached critical mass, setting off a chain reaction similar to what happens in nuclear reactions, only it will occur on an broader scale on all scales in thrusts that create a reconciled renewal of all things physical and metaphysical (mental/spiritual) alinged with Source, hidden (incarnated) in all things at all scales since time began.
Quoting Solomom, second in line for wisdom after Jesus, “there is nothing new under the sun;” just the same things happening to different people over time, governed by the same laws of physics and metaphysics operative at all scales in all gnerations, known by different names.
Recall the spiritual mechanics (physics) involved in Jesus’ report of his second return, that point of maximum tension on earth between lower (darkness) and higher (light) forms of the SAME energy will have reched critical mass creating a chain reaction on a scale whose magnitude will be sudden, visibly obvious worldwide, swift, and radiant “flashing across the sky like lightning between east and west” (Matt 24:27, Lk 17:24).
There you have it, the two poles, and a flash of a reconciling third bridging them creating newness (“new heaven and new earth”) as friction usually does at all scaless universally since the moment of creation (the Big Bang event) catalyzed by light and heat — “Let there be light” (Gen. 1:3).
Spirituality is nothing more than the physics the most integrated of his remnant, is just beginning to understand.
That’s physics, Mike, whose laws transcend and supersede into the invisible realm beyon the ordinary laws of classical physics.
P.S. Sorry, Mike. Forgot to add in the above note (forgive the mis-spelllings) that critical mass on the globe may likely be reached after so many go-rounds between the powers of light and darkness, no more powerfully manifested in tribal warfare Earth is known for.
Re: the chain reaction following the tension of opposites reaching critical mass on Earth, and the “remant” (wheat) of those called or evolved along spiritually awakened lines at the harvest (ingathering) as characterized in both the OT and NT, will occur in INVERSE proportion to the powers of darkness gathering global strength like no other time in history, feeding as it has and will on the energy of the innocents, powerless, marginal, and righteous, commonf folk the world over who do not start wars, nor desire war. Only their materially minded and power crazed leaders do.
If interested, you can read about the evolutionary power of war, and reconciling the tension of opposites in my recent blog post below, Part 9 in a series.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjryqmPw-CTAxXwmmoFHVRkKmEQFnoECBoQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fdtnetwork.org%2Fchristogenesis-part-9-chaos-conflict-and-coherence-war-as-evolutionary-pressure%2F&usg=AOvVaw0XcxkiMY1wROMOO0rMQr9q&opi=89978449