From Holy Week to Holy Work: An Easter for the World Becoming

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.

It begins again in the dark.
A tomb. A tear. A trembling.
A trap we’ve been in before.

Each Holy Week — that inflection point where Jesus’ message of evolutionary, revolutionary Love clashes decisively with the totalizing forces of death-dealing colonization — the calendar invites us not into nostalgia, but initiation. 

This fast-turned-feast, observed in one form or fashion by a third of the planet’s population, is often misunderstood: It isn’t about rote reenactment, it’s about 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 isn’t soft; it’s a blade. The unlikely Messiah didn’t die for milquetoast moralism. His life — a blaze of love, justice, and defiance — ignited the monoculture’s fear, and they snuffed it out.

Or 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, I cling to a strange, luminous trust: 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 seemingly 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

New arisings often come from threes. At least, that’s one of the central ideas of an inner work school that’s surfaced in the past century, which has been shaping my life for the past decade. The enigmatic mystic G.I. Gurdjieff’s life unfolded across the fault lines of empire and revolution—from his family’s flight from Ottoman persecution, to near-fatal gunshot wounds during geopolitical uprisings, to his escape from the Russian Civil War and survival of 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. 

Growing up with an Ashokh (storyteller) father at a geo-spiritual crossroads between Orthodox monastics, Sufi Shaykhs, and Yogic masters of bodily rigors, Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way seeks to harmonize mind, heart, and body into 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, and can be harnessed 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 priest and Fourth Way student Cynthia Bourgeault’s summary:

1.  “In every new arising there are three forces involved: affirming, denying, and reconciling.
2. The interweaving of the three produces a fourth in a new dimension.
3. Affirming, denying, and reconciling are not fixed points or permanent essence attributes, but can and do shift and must be discerned situationally.
4. 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 crises, the betrayals, 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 breathed his last. 

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, this reconciling force reveals itself as the emergence of something utterly new: 

Life reborn, a synthesis beyond mere resuscitation. The polarities of life and death are transcended in 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; the 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, that we must push against to take the next dance step? Our First (or Affirming) Force could be our love for democracy, 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 outlandish 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 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 are included 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 movement of compassion, an inner transformation 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.

Divine Communion, after Rublev

The Law of Seven: The Winding Path of Process

Palm Sunday’s Affirming — a public defiance, dignified with Divine desire.
Maundy Thursday’s Denying — betrayal, breakdown, a Beloved who bows.
Good Friday — the clash of forces. Execution. The State’s brutal “No.”
Holy Saturday — silence. Descent. High strangeness. Waiting.

If the Law of Three reveals the structure of transformation, Gurdjieff’s other key principle – the Law of Seven (which he gives the even more unwieldy name Heptaparaparshinokh) – reveals the rhythm through which transformation unfolds. Also known as the Law of Octaves, it says that processes develop not in straight lines, but in a musical sequence of intervals. 

Consider a do-re-mi scale: between mi and fa, and again between ti and do, there’s a natural pause or lowering of energy. Unless an extra shock or input enters to boost the momentum, a process might veer off course at those points. We’ve all experienced this: New Year’s resolutions fizzle mid-February, social and political movements lose steam. According to the Law of Seven, nothing real and new is achieved without passing through ups and downs, twists and turns. There are inflection points where things can stall or go off-course, plateaus or crises where progress stalls. Without conscious attention or a new impulse, things can drift, degrade, or loop back on themselves. But if met with consciousness and additional force, the process continues to completion.

We can see this in Holy Week, too. The initial impulse of Jesus’s arrival (Palm Sunday’s enthusiastic welcome) hit a substantial interval by Thursday night: the Last Supper and Gethsemane. At that point, without a “shock,” the disciples’ courage faltered – they fell asleep, they fled, they denied. Gurdjieff would say the octave of transformation nearly went off-key there. But Jesus’ own conscious choice in Gethsemane – “Not my will, but Thy will be done” – was a shock of intentionality that kept the process on-track. He injected the force of surrender and love at the very point where inertia and fear threatened to derail the mission. The result was that he went through the crucifixion ordeal with purpose, not as meaningless tragedy but as part of a willed alchemy. (This doesn’t let the powers-that-be off the hook for their unspeakable horrors, by the way; it only names Jesus’ own role in consciously choosing his role.)

The pattern repeats: after the resurrection, the next interval came as his apprentices struggled to believe and embody this new life. Again, a shock was given – their encounters with the Risen Christ, the empowerment of the Spirit at Pentecost – to carry them into a new octave of faith. Evolution is full of these fits and starts. We take two steps forward, one step back. We hit walls and either slump into defeat or open to a breakthrough. Processes unfold in octaves with intervals (points of entropy) where energy falters unless a ‘shock’ – a new energy or intention – sustains progress. It’s true in personal growth (think of the midpoint crisis in a long therapy journey or the infamous sophomore slump in a project) and in history (revolutions that either fizzle or receive fresh momentum).

What this means, practically, is that we must cultivate conscious presence and persistence, especially at critical junctures. Gurdjieff noted that humanity as a whole tends to live in a state of semi-conscious “waking sleep,” drifting along habitual grooves. This makes us vulnerable to getting stuck in loops – personally and collectively. To break through, we need intentional shocks – which can be something we create (like a deliberate change in habit, a courageous conversation, a communal ritual) or something life delivers (a crisis, an insight, even trauma can serve, if met consciously). Holy Week contains both kinds: Jesus chooses to ride into Jerusalem in a provocative way, and later absorbs the shock of betrayal and violence. Both play a part in the octave of redemption.

It’s not a linear march; it’s an octave leap. Ancient Way-faring mystics spoke of Easter as the “Eighth Day” of Creation — a new octave beyond the seven-day week. Without the depths of Holy Saturday, we would not grasp the full light of Easter Sunday.

This pattern reassures us that our current geopolitical moment, pure Leviathanical chaos monster that it is, might be part of a larger process — an evolutionary octave. As Swiss philosopher and linguist Jean Gebser and other visionaries of consciousness have noted, chaos often precedes a leap into a new structure of being. “Time of transition” is another way to say we are between mi and fa — things feel unstable because a new note is trying to sound. 

If we persevere with awareness, fully receiving these needed conscious shocks with courage, forgiveness, or innovation at critical junctures, the melody will carry on and the dance will continue. Gurdjieff’s student J.G. Bennett pointed out that every complete process has seven different qualities that must be expressed​, and we are living through each in turn. As my beloved doula friend Heather Grace might say, our aim as Resurrection People is to midwife the process, to stay awake, and to witness the miracle of new life. 

In practical terms: when progress seems to halt, we inject a dose of unexpected love: we act out of the box, we pray or protest (or pro-testify by creating the world we wish to inhabit, on whatever scale we’re capable) in new ways. These are the pivots that keep evolution’s revolution moving toward its fulfillment – toward that octave jump of a just, healing world.

The Crucible of Now: Alchemy in Our Time

We find ourselves today in a tumultuous time – some might say an apocalyptic time (in the true sense of “apocalypse” meaning unveiling). The dual crises of our age – the social/political upheavals and the ecological emergency – feel like a collective crucifixion. Old certainties are collapsing. In recent years, we’ve seen a sharp rise in authoritarian and nationalist movements, in the U.S. and abroad. We’ve also seen the once-theoretical climate crisis manifest in catastrophic wildfires, floods, and extinctions. It’s easy to see these as pure tragedy – and they are deeply tragic in their effects. But if we step back and view them through the lens of the Holy Week pattern, we might also see an alchemical process at work on a grand scale. Could it be that we are in the throes of a kind of global Good Friday and Holy Saturday, which, if met with the reconciling force of love-in-action, could produce an epochal Easter – a societal resurrection into a new way of being?

Let’s not sugar-coat it: on the surface, what we have is suffering and chaos. Political polarization has families and friends feuding; disinformation and fear are rampant. The rise of overt racist ideologies and anti-democratic sentiment in America shows that old demons we thought defeated are merely resurfacing. Our social fabric feels like it’s tearing. Meanwhile, our planetary fabric is tearing: the very stability of Earth’s climate, oceans, and biodiversity is unraveling due to human greed and “progress.” We are nearing tipping points that could make our common home a very inhospitable place for the children of tomorrow. This is the reality of the cross staring us in the face – the consequences of collective sin (using this word in a systemic sense). We cannot deny any of this without retreating into dangerous delusion.

And yet – precisely because things are so bad – something new wants to be born. There’s a principle I’ve noticed: the greater the pressure, the greater the potential for breakthrough. The alchemists spoke of the coniunctio oppositorum, the conjunction of opposites, as the source of the Philosopher’s Stone. Well, we have plenty of opposites clashing now! Take the body politic: on one side, a vision of society (however flawed) that aspires to inclusivity, equity, and global cooperation – let’s call this an affirming force of our age. On the other side, a reactionary vision fueled by anger, fear, and nostalgia for an imagined past purity – a denying force. Both are powerful. Neither is going away easily. They lock horns in what seems an irreconcilable battle. Many of us feel caught in between, exhausted by the fight. But what if this very conflict is the labor pains of a new birth? What if a Third Force is quietly entering the fray – an unexpected creative response that is neither naive idealism nor cynical backlash, but something brand-new, rooted in deep solidarity with people and planet?

I believe we see hints of this already. For instance, amidst tired polarizations, there are local communities finding innovative ways to heal divisions – through dialogue circles, restorative justice, and cooperative projects that bring unlikely allies together. When a far-right and a far-left group sit down and both help, say, clean up after a flood (as I experienced in my city firsthand last fall), sometimes they experience a crack in the wall between them, a recognition of shared humanity. That is third force in action: reconciling people beyond ideology through common love for their neighbors and land. It doesn’t fit into existing political frameworks – it’s a new thing. We see it in movements of young people who refuse the old categories altogether and insist on pragmatic solutions rooted in economics and earth. We see it in spiritual circles where consciousness and action meet, bringing inner transformation to fuel outer change.

The ecological crisis, too, is evoking a reconciling force. On one side, you have industrial/exploitative momentum (the always-dubious biblical translation “subue the earth” taken to its extreme) – this is the denying force, denying limits. On the other, you have the affirming force of nature’s inherent drive toward life – ecosystems trying to heal, the earth responding with signals (fever, disturbance) to awaken us. When firestorms and hurricanes ravage communities, it is as if the earth and poor alike are crying, “Enough!” The clash is fierce. The potential third force here might be an emergent ecological consciousness in humanity – an awakening of profound kinship with all life. Many people report that after experiencing a climate disaster, they undergo a personal conversion: they realize viscerally that we are part of nature, not apart from it, and they devote themselves to regenerative action. I’ve seen communities rebuilding in greener ways, citizens demanding bold climate policies, and also a spiritual renewal – a return to indigenous wisdom and Earth-based spirituality among people who previously never gave it a thought. In these responses, one can sense the seeds of a “fourth” new arising, birthed from the resurrection of Third Force: a culture that could be born from the reconciliation of human innovation with natural harmony, techno-industrial savvy guided by deep ecological reverence. The fancy term for this is regenerative cultures, but in spiritual language we might call it living in the Resurrection – participating in the life-giving pattern of God in all things.

Gurdjieff taught that humanity’s usual state of consciousness is insufficient to meet our challenges; we need to wake up. Crises can either make us numb out in despair or double down on ego – or they can shock us into a higher awareness. Every catastrophe carries within it the possibility of conversion. It’s not automatic – it depends on whether we bring presence to it. 

This is why I see our era as a great Holy Saturday moment, stumbling in the dusk around the lake. The “old normal” lies dead or dying; the “new” has yet to fully emerge. We risk falling into the abyss of hopelessness (a real danger – so many people are giving up on truth, on compassion, even on life itself). But Holy Saturday teaches us not to abandon the tomb. Wait. Watch. Something is incubating. Participate in the incubation. 

How? By refusing to flee or fight in the old ways, and instead searching out the third force in every situation. “Solutions to impasses generally come by learning how to spot and mediate third force, which is present in every situation but generally hidden,” Bourgeault writes​. In practical terms, that might mean in a political argument, you become the one who listens for the underlying needs and speaks to those, rather than just rebutting points. Or in activism, you look for unlikely partnerships (e.g. climate activists partnering with evangelical churches to install solar panels – shared values emerging). Or in an internal struggle, you pray not just for your desired outcome, but for the grace to see a perspective you haven’t seen – to reconcile some part of you that is at war with another part.

We can also apply the Law of Seven to our current moment: clearly, the process of global change is at a stuck interval. Perhaps the initial burst of globalization and technological progress (do-re-mi) has hit its mi-fa gap in the form of environmental and social backlash. To continue the “melody” toward a humane future, a shock of consciousness is needed – a Pentecost of sorts, a collective awakening. This might sound grandiose, but many sense it intuitively: either we have a leap in awareness or we perish. And here’s the paradox: that leap won’t come to a smug, comfortable world – it tends to come precisely when the world is on its knees. The cross precedes the resurrection. The pressure in the crucible is what catalyzes the chemistry.

I don’t celebrate the pain of this era; it breaks my heart daily. But I refuse to believe it’s pointless. I see signs that it’s purgatorial – cleansing, purposeful – and that gives me hope. Barbara Johnson once wrote, “We are Easter people living in a Good Friday world.” That doesn’t mean we deny the Friday reality, but it means we carry Sunday’s promise in our bones as we engage with it. It means we strive to be, as Quaker, mystic, and Civil Rights sage Howard Thurman put it, “prisoners of hope” – unable to stop hoping, not because of wishful thinking but because we have seen something. The early disciples had seen the empty tomb; we have seen, perhaps, glimpses of beloved community, flashes of the possible human, experiences of oneness that we can’t forget. Those become our anchor.

The Power of the Resurrection, the Communion of Life

Active Anticipation: Living as a Paschal People

After Jesus rose, the angels at the tomb told the women, “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” It’s a good question for us. How often do we look for life in the tombs of old habits, old grudges, old paradigms? To be a Paschal (Passover/Easter) people is to shift our orientation – to seek the living among the living. It is to cultivate a posture of active anticipation: expecting resurrection not in a passive, twiddling-thumbs way, but by actively preparing for it, co-creating it. The difference between sentimentality and hope is action. Sentimentality wants a happy ending but shirks the struggle; cynicism expects a bad ending and doesn’t even try. Hope – in the robust, resurrection sense – rolls up its sleeves and lives into the coming Kingdom here and now.

What does this look like on Tuesday morning or Thursday afternoon? It might be as simple (and difficult) as choosing to be kind to someone who is hard for you to love, or choosing to forgive when you’re hurt. It might be speaking truth in a space where silence would be easier, or conversely, holding silence when reaction would be easy. It means infusing resurrection values into our daily decisions: mercy, generosity, courage, and trust, even when the external circumstances make that seem foolish. In my life, it has meant learning to sit with discomfort rather than reaching for an escape. It has meant continuing to pray – sometimes through gritted teeth – for those who oppose me, to “love my enemies” in very concrete ways (like engaging in respectful dialogue or finding some common-ground project). It has meant organizing for change even when change seems impossible, and simultaneously praying with fervor, because I know my own strength isn’t enough.

Active anticipation is very much a Holy Saturday stance. The early Way-farers, on Holy Saturday, didn’t know Easter was coming – but some part of them must have kept a flame of faith alive, because by Sunday evening they were gathered together in the upper room, ready to receive the news when it came. They hadn’t all given up and gone home. That alone is a testament: they kept the ember glowing. Perhaps it was the faithful women who fanned that ember – Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and others. Tradition says they kept prayerful vigil. We too are called to vigil. In this in-between time for the world, to vigil means to stay spiritually awake and ethically engaged. It’s to refuse both naive optimism and jaded nihilism, and instead to watch and pray – and act when called for – like gardeners waiting for a seed to sprout, watering the ground even before they see the green.

There’s a beautiful term used in Orthodox Christianity: bright sadness. It describes the tone of Holy Saturday – a day that is hushed and mournful, yet tinted with the first gleam of Easter. We live in bright sadness. We acknowledge the grief of a warming earth, the sorrow of communities torn by hate, the personal losses we carry – and we do not pretend all that is nothing. But we also claim the brightness that peeks through: the irrepressible human spirit that keeps loving, the daily miracles of beauty, the times reconciliation happens against all odds. We amplify those. Being Easter people doesn’t mean going around saying “Alleluia” when someone is suffering; it means being the kind of presence that can sit with the suffering and still radiate the assurance, “This is not the end. I’m here with you. We will get through.” As my preacher friend Hugh Hollowell says, “I might not be able to keep your lights on, but I’ll sit with you in the dark.” Sometimes just that companionship is the reconciling force that turns a situation around.

In practical terms, living in active anticipation might involve spiritual practices that keep us grounded in resurrection awareness. For me, contemplative prayer and meditation are vital – not as a way to escape the world, but to plug into the deeper reality underpinning the world. In contemplation, I commune with the Source of all becoming, recharging me to re-enter the fray with love. Communal worship or singing can do it, too – anything that connects us to faith, hope, and love in a felt way. And then, relational practices: gathering with others who are committed to hope. There’s a reason Jesus formed a collective and not just solo warriors. We need each other, whether that looks like conventional religious community or not. Resurrection is contagious when shared. As the South African proverb says, “Because we are, I am.” In the new arising of Easter, community is the context where the new life blossoms. After all, the first thing the risen Jesus did was gather his friends for breakfast on the beach, and later send them out two by two.

Let’s also remember joy. “Hard-won hope” should still make space for laughter and delight. I think of how Anne Lamott, with her wry humor, talks about finding little resurrections in messy life – a friend’s snarky joke in an AA meeting that breaks the tension, or a random dog licking your face when you cry. These are tiny third forces, too, you know? They reconcile us with life in the moment. One could almost say Holy Spirit often takes the form of humor and surprise – the little twists that crack our hardened heart open just as Leonard Cohen sang, for the light to get in. 

Resurrection gold loves to Kintsugi (金継ぎ) our cracks.

Holy Equation Practice: Embodying the New Arising

And so:

Third Force.
A breathing.
A breaking.
A becoming.

“The One you seek is not here.”

But where, pray tell, is here?

As you stand at Easter’s threshold, I refuse to tie everything up for you in a neat bow. Because that wasn’t the experience of those earliest apprentices of Jesus, and it isn’t for those of us considering his Way now. From those initial dude’s doubting Mary Magdalene’s angelic illumination to our own understandable struggles with spotting Third Force when everything seems to be falling apart, I don’t want you to take anything on blind belief. 

Instead, I offer a simple embodied practice to help ground the lofty ideas  we’ve been exploring. This practice draws on Gurdjieff’s original Holy Equation Exercise, structured from the Orthodox Trisagion Prayer. This exercise invites all three centers (mind, heart, body) to a common aim:

Holy-Affirming,
Holy-Denying,
Holy-Reconciling:
Transubstantiate in me,
For my Being

We will pray it in a way that involves our whole being:

1. Prepare: Find a quiet space. Stand or sit upright, feet firmly on the ground. Take a few full breaths, feeling your body weight supported and allowing your mind to relax. Set the intention to be present in mind, heart, and body – all three.
2. Holy-Affirming (Head): Join your right hand’s first three fingers together, letting the two other fingers rest in the palm, and touch your forehead. Speak aloud or inwardly the words “Holy-Affirming.” As you do, bring your attention to your head, the center of thought. Let flash through your mind something you deeply affirm – a fundamental yes in your life. It could be love for your chosen family, a commitment to truth, or the simple goodness of being alive. Let this yes fill your mind. This is the active, creative principle – welcome it.
3. Holy-Denying (Heart): Next, draw your right hand down to your heart (or solar plexus) and speak (aloud or inwardly) “Holy-Denying.” Drop your attention into your heart center and acknowledge any “no” that is present. It could be personal grief, fear, or the portion of the planetary suffering that you carry. Rather than resisting it, allow its feeling to pass through you. This is not a clenching, but a holy and self-chosen allowing – the honest reality of whatever hurts or constrains. Let it compassionately move through you. As your hand rests here, offer the yes from your head to meet the no in your heart, without trying to resolve anything. Just let them coexist in you for a moment. This is the tension where miracles can brew.
4. Holy-Reconciling (Body/Gut): Now bring your hand up, from left to right shoulder (or right to left; different lineages do this differently), speaking or thinking “Holy-Reconciling.” Bring your attention further down to your lower belly – the core of your body, sometimes called the gut or moving center. Feel the physical sensations: your breath low in your abdomen, the contact of your body with the chair or ground. Imagine the affirming and denying forces from the previous steps meeting here in your physical being. Intend for a reconciling force to arise – not by your will alone, but as a grace. You might visualize it as a warm glow in your belly or a stability in your pelvis. This is the place of incarnation, where spirit and matter mingle. Holy-Reconciling might arrive as a new insight, a feeling of peace, or just a subtle sense of alignment. Receive it, even if it feels like “just me standing here.” Something beyond “just you” is present.
5. Transubstantiate in me, for my Being: Finally, open your hand and rest it on your chest again, bowing slightly and speaking: “Transubstantiate in me, for my Being.” Let the meaning sink in: you are asking that these holy forces not remain theory, but actually change your substance. Transubstantiate – a word usually used for bread and wine becoming Christ’s Body and Blood in many understandings of Communion – here means let my very being be transformed by the interplay of Yes, No, and the Reconciler. As you say these words, envision the energy from your head (affirming) and heart (denying) being taken up into that reconciling warmth in your core, then spreading through your whole body. You are the food and drink of this moment, offered to become a vessel of new Life. Stand or sit for a few more breaths in silence, simply feeling what is now present. You might feel grace, or grief, or just stillness — all is well. The prayer is at work in you.

Even when I don’t have time to otherwise pray or meditate, I practice this Holy Equation nearly every day; the above description might be a mouthful, but it only takes seconds. 

This practice is a way of participating in that great, collective resurrection stream with your whole self. Rather than just celebrating an event that happened long ago, you become a microcosm of the Easter Feast. In you, life’s various affirming and denying forces join in reconciling creativity. 

In this exercise as well as in life, you begin to allow Blessed Trinity’s dance to spin you right ‘round into alchemical gold — to transubstantiate you. This is what Oxford Inkling Owen Barfield might name “final participation”, what Cynthia Bourgeault might call “imaginal seeing,” and what the first-century apostle Paul might identify as “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” It is deeply intimate and astonishingly real.

In doing this, we may also contribute to the collective transformation. As Gurdjieff intimated, our conscious efforts feed into the world’s becoming – “I hold myself together by feeding,” he quipped, describing the mutual nourishment of the cosmos​

As I’ve come to see it, we feast on Divine energies even as God feeds on our recollected experience – a reciprocal exchange of love. In prayer, in practice, in compassionate action, we perform our small part of the being-duty that tilts the scales toward balance.

From Crisis to Credible Hope

Your author connecting with the energies of resurrection in a simpler time, last Easter.

As we emerge from this practice, we carry within us the seeds of credible hope. The world may still be in turmoil – regimes rise and fall, the climate shifts, societies fracture. But something is different in our gaze. We can perceive, with the eye of the heart, the transmutation underway. We trust that even the contrary forces (be they set up in any particular sequence as the initiating-affirming or responding-denying) have their place in the great open dance; we look for the Third Force in every conflict; we remember that all seven notes of the song must be played before the final chord resolves. We become patients and midwives of a process larger than our lifetimes, yet imminently felt in each moment of choice.

The Paschal Mystery teaches us that Love is stronger than death — not as a platitude, but in the profound way that absorbs death into itself and still rises. In this time of attempted humiliation, degradation, ‘flooding the zone’ with shock-and-awe terrors, Love’s rising might look like Beloved Communities choosing generosity amid scarcity, becoming what early German refusenik (one of my favorite Holy Deniers) Dietrich Boenhoffer retrieved from ancient tradition as the Disciplina Arcani, the discipline of the secret, to become a ‘confessing church’ amid a culture of denials. It might look like individuals seeing the planks in our own eyes so as not to project them onto others. It might look like peculiar people – opti-mystics – refusing to give up on the world, because they see through the world into what it could be. We are luminous witnesses in dusky times. Intimate with sorrow, but confident in joy. Humble in our not-knowing, yet bold in our creative response.

We choose to consider, with all the sincerity we can call upon, that “everything that lives is holy.” 

This includes even us;
This includes even this moment. 

May you feel Easter’s tremors in your body;
May you sense the dance of Threefold unfurling amidst this struggle. 

I invite you to daily return to this three-centered prayer:

Holy-Affirming,
Holy-Denying,
Holy-Reconciling:
Transubstantiate in me,
For my Being

… and know that the Blessed One is dancing in you. 

Resurrection is here — rising in that strange cooperation of warm/cold pressure fronts from above and below, actualizing in this midheaven milieu. Through our seeing, sweat, and rest, we welcome transfiguration into this world, in the here and now. 

And so here we are, Son of Humanity — stuck in the middle with You.

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! Resurrecting Wonder: On Magic, Jesus & Holy Hijinks with Jo’el Adifon Thecla’s Holy Rebellion: What a First-Century Feminine Firebrand Can Light-Up About Lent! The Beginning of the World as We Know It: Civilization, Empire, & the Counter-Cult of Jesus with John Dominic Crossan