One of the most seminal depictions of interbeing, Rublev’s icon of the Trinity (c. 15th century) depicts three angels at Abraham and Sarah’s table – an image of divine fellowship. Tradition holds that there was space at the front of the table, sometimes depicted with a mirror, inviting us into the circle of communion. This is Trinity – After Rublev, Southwark, by contemporary artist Meg Wroe.
Trinity Sunday is the stealth holiday of the church year – often overlooked, tucked quietly between the fire of Pentecost and the long stretch of Ordinary Time. After the combustive tongues of flame and before “normal life” resumes, Trinity Sunday can feel like an abstract afterthought. Many faith communities admit they don’t know how to speak of, nevermind meaningfully receive, the Triune life of God. As a doctrine, the “Three-in-One” seems elusive, a square monotheistic God attempting to fit in a perichoretic circular hole! Often reduced to a kind of theological math problem, Immanuel Kant once quipped that nothing practical comes from belief in the Trinity; in our modern age of disenchantment this feast has indeed fallen onto hard times. Yet precisely here – in this almost-forgotten lectionary season pause – lies an invitation. Nestled after Pentecost’s blaze, Trinity Sunday offers a sacred breather, a chance to absorb what it means that God is not a distant monarch but a divine circle of Love.
Could this gentle feast actually set an essential pace for the rest of the year ahead?
In our culture, summers often kick off a headlong rush – work projects, family trips, society’s frenetic rhythms. Add to this increasing societal disintegration in the form of essential social safety nets being eroded, masked ICE agents disappearing our neighbors off the streets, and rising authoritarianism. But the liturgical calendar gifts us Trinity Sunday as a moment of reorientation in the midst of chaos. It whispers center down; sit at the table of Divine Hospitality. As the apostle Paul blessed the rambunctious, gifted, fraught first-century assembly in Corinth:
May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.
(2 Corinthians 13:14)
Can we receive this grace, love, and fellowship here and now, in the midst of what feels like the erosion of hospitality and democracy’s demise?
Far from being impractical, Trinity’s very mystery can refresh our burdened souls and realign our timetables. This day invites us to step back from the cacophony and recover a trinitarian symphony – a balance of contemplation, relationship, and action – to carry us through the year. Like a musical time signature, the Trinity’s threefold beat can keep us dancing in sync with God’s generous love through every season of life.
Let’s explore connecting with Trinity on three intertwining levels – Esoteric, Mesoteric, and Exoteric – from the innermost contemplative encounter to our shared relationships, to outward arcs of justice and healing. At each level, God’s Triune Presence offers a way to pace ourselves and participate in a momentum of love, justice, and belonging.
Esoteric – The Turning Within
On an esoteric level – the level of inner experience and contemplation – the Trinity isn’t a puzzle to be solved but a relationship to be savored. The early Church mystics dared to call God’s Triune life a perichoresis, a circle dance of mutual indwelling. In this view, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are engaged in an eternal embrace – a circular celebration of self-giving love, with room at the table for the whole world. In fact, the famous icon by Andrei Rublev (inspired by the three angels who visited Abraham and Sarah) features an open space at the front. Some speculate that a reflective surface was once there, a mirror – hinting that you, the observer, are invited into the scene. At the heart of reality, then, is not solitary, uni-directional power but a Communion. God is an eternal fellowship – the Holy One presenced in the dynamic and loving action of Three. And astonishingly, that fellowship welcomes us in.
As Fr. Richard Rohr and I affirm in The Divine Dance, the Trinity is not a closed circle; we were “always made for this.” Jesus emerges from the Trinity’s eternal fullness to show us that we each have a place at God’s table – “a participant at this banquet and a partner in God’s eternal dance of love and communion.” Salvation, in this view, isn’t a ticket to a far-off heaven but an invitation into intimacy with God, starting now. The apostle Paul hints at this lived experience when he writes that through Jesus “we have peace with God” and “the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.” (Roman 5:1; In other words, the Trinity’s love is something we feel in our depths – a peace and warmth moving through us from Source to Son to Spirit.
Drawing from early 20th century Armenian teacher G.I. Gurdjieff, contemplative teachers like Cynthia Bourgeault offer subtle perspective about how Trinity is woven into the fabric of reality – a kind of “cosmic law and creative template” for how life generates and evolves. She speaks of the Law of Three: whenever there is dynamism and change, it often unfolds through a dance of three forces – an affirming force, a resisting force, and a reconciling force. The Trinity, she notes, embodies this generative principle: it’s the “inherent capacity of threefoldness to break symmetry and let the differences interact,” yielding something new. In plain terms, God’s One-ness is not static or stingy – it’s creative, playful, even. Proverbs 8 paints Wisdom (whom many see as a feminine image of the Logos or Spirit) as God’s partner before and during creation: “When God marked out the vault of the sky… then I was beside God as a master worker, delighting day by day, playing before him… finding delight in the human race.” At the core of the universe, there is a holy playfulness – a Joy that flows between Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, spilling out into creation.
What would it mean to trust that we are already included in that flow of love? For me, it begins in contemplative prayer – sitting still, breathing slowly, maybe repeating a sacred word – essentially hanging out in the Love between Father, Son, and Spirit. I sometimes imagine myself at at that table with Abraham and Sarah, the Trinity gazing at me with infinite acceptance. In those moments of quiet, I touch what theologian James B. Torrance called “the divine fellowship of love” – the original community that birthed our souls. This esoteric encounter is not about intellectual understanding; it’s about intimacy. It is where Jesus’ promise becomes real: “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth… [Spirit] will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.” In other words, the Spirit is whispering to our spirit: “You are included. All that love and union I share with the Father – I share with you.”
Allowing ourselves to feast on the Holy Trinity can be profoundly healing. It puts our busy minds on pause and lets our hearts soak in Relationship itself. This is the pacing point Trinity Sunday offers: before rushing back into to-do lists and social struggles, drink from the divine well. Let the unforced rhythm of Father, Son, and Spirit set the tempo of your life. In silence, in centering prayer, in a walk in nature, we practice being held in the Trinity’s embrace. This inner grounding then gives rise to the next layer – how we treat others.
Mesoteric – Trinity in Relationship (Interbeing Among Us)
If the esoteric is about the soul’s direct communion with God, the mesoteric is about the spaces between – the relational field where the Trinity’s pattern can echo in our human communities. The word “mesoteric” literally means “middle” or “in between,” and it points to the shared life among people, plants, animals, ecosystems – the social-spiritual reality we create together. Here the Trinity moves from prayer closet to dinner table, from meditation cushion to meeting circle. What does it mean to say not only that God is a fellowship, but that we are invited to mirror that fellowship in our relationships?
It means reimagining community as sacred. Jesus prayed that all his followers “may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you” (see John 17) – an audacious plea for human unity reflecting divine unity. Trinity isn’t just a doctrine about God; it’s an embodied practice of love, listening, and mutual presence. We glimpse it whenever we experience deep kinship or genuine dialogue. As I said in another Trinity Sunday reflection, “as I’ve sat at God’s table more and more, the fellowship of the Trinity has taken away my power to choose who are the good folks and who are bad ones; I no longer have the freedom to choose who I show respect to…” Once we’ve been loved without measure by God, we lose our taste for the bitter binaries of worthy/unworthy, insider/outsider. The Trinity rearranges our social prejudices. We start to see everyone – everyone – as bearing the divine image, welcomed into the circle.
Author and activist Sara Miles learned this through visceral experience. A San Francisco cook-turned-minister, she wandered into a church one day, ate a piece of communion bread, and it upended her life. In her memoir Take This Bread, she describes hearing a Voice that “advocates for the least qualified, least official, least likely; that upsets the established order and makes a joke of certainty. It proclaims against reason that the hungry will be fed, that those cast down will be raised up, and that all things, including my own failures, are being made new. It offers food without exception to the worthy and unworthy… and then commands everyone to do the same. It doesn’t promise to solve or erase suffering but to transform it, pledging that by loving one another, even through pain, we will find more life. And it insists that by opening ourselves to strangers… we will see more and more of the holy, since, without exception, all people are one body: God’s.”
What is this other than a description of trinitarian life bursting forth in the mess of human relationships? Father, Son, and Spirit live in radical equality and unity, and here they are nudging Sara (and us) to practice the same – to open our tables, hearts, and lives to “the least likely,” to welcome the stranger as our own. The Trinity’s inter-relational love “cracks our convictions open” and upsets our neat categories. Suddenly, we have family everywhere. We find the face of Christ in those we thought we had nothing in common with. We start to realize that relationship itself is holy ground.
In the pages of The Divine Dance, Richard Rohr and I experimented with what we call “we-space” practices – exercises that cultivate authentic presence and connection among people. In fact, some years back we co-created interpersonal contemplative games (yes, games!) to help groups tangibly experience “interbeing.” One simple but profound practice we use is called “Noticing.” It’s essentially mindful dialogue in pairs. One person begins by stating, “Sitting here with you, I notice…,” sharing whatever is arising – a sensation, an emotion, a thought. The partner listens and then responds, “Hearing that, I notice…,” and so on. Back and forth they go, trading awareness, without any crosstalk or analysis. It’s amazing what happens: the room’s buzz dies down, a hush of presence falls, and people who were strangers five minutes ago suddenly find themselves deeply connected – breathing in sync, eyes often moist with a tenderness that wasn’t there before. This simple exercise in shared awareness creates a field of presence. In the words of one participant, “I felt like I was standing on holy ground with my partner – like God was somehow in the space between us.” I get chills even recalling it, because I believe that’s exactly right: God is in the space between us. The Trinity is that space-between, the Love that flows back and forth. When we pay attention together – when I truly see you and you truly see me – the Spirit of Truth moves among us, knitting us into one.
This mesoteric layer of Trinity calls us to practice fellowship as sacrament. Table meals, support groups, friendship circles, neighborhood potlucks, honest family conversations – these become little icons of the divine fellowship. Even (or especially) when awkward or messy! Recall how Abraham and Sarah hurried to host the three mysterious visitors in Genesis 18, setting a meal before them; the icon of those three around a table has become the symbol of Trinitarian welcome. Robert Farrar Capon wryly pointed out that Abraham’s hospitality was far from perfect (Sarah literally laughed in God’s face in skepticism!), yet God still blessed the encounter. In Capon’s words, “The City of God began with a meal that didn’t go right; your spilled milk isn’t going to hold up the building of it too much.” In other words, fear not the fumbles. When we gather – even clumsily – in the Spirit of love, the Trinity is eager to work through our community. The ordinary becomes holy. By simply showing up for one another, we participate in the divine life that holds everything together.
So if you want a practice for Trinity Sunday and beyond: invite a few people over for dinner, or coffee, or a walk. Sit in a circle and share from the heart. Try the “Noticing” practice or just let each person speak without interruption. Embrace silence together – perhaps open with a minute of quiet prayer, acknowledging God’s presence. Read a short scripture (maybe Romans 5:1-5 or John 16:12-15 from this week’s Lectionary readings) and let it spark dialogue. Bless one another. These small acts attune us to the Divine Presence between us. Life in the Trinity is meant to be shared – “where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them,” Jesus promised. In a world of social isolation and fragmentation, choosing to cultivate communion – real, tangible, face-to-face love – is downright revolutionary. It is also the training ground for the next step: allowing Trinity love to flow out beyond our immediate circles into the wider world in acts of solidarity and justice.
Exoteric – Love and Solidarity in Action
If contemplation is the inhale and community is the heart, then compassionate action is the exhale of our trinitarian life. The exoteric layer is outward-facing: the way we embody God’s love in public, in the structures of society and the struggles of our neighbors. As Cornell West famously said, “Justice is what love looks like in public.” And public love – solidarity – is what the Trinity looks like when turned outward toward creation. The same flow of love we touched in prayer and practiced in community now propels us to stand with the suffering, speak truth to power, and co-create a more just world.
We live in a time of immense upheaval and need; it’s impossible to contemplate the Trinity as an eternal dance of love without feeling the dissonance of human cruelty and pain. In fact, ignoring that pain would mean we haven’t truly absorbed the lesson of Trinity at all, because the Trinity is not a closed circle of self-concern – God is always pouring Godself out. As theologians say, the Trinity is kenotic (self-emptying) love. God so loved the world that Christ entered our history, and the Spirit groans with us even now. Thus, our participation in the Trinity must lead us to the wounded places.
What does it mean to live the Trinity in the headlines of today? It means we refuse to remain aloof from our siblings’ pain. It means we seek the image of the Triune God even in those our society treats as expendable. Consider Gaza, for instance. This very week, even as some of us sing “Holy, Holy, Holy,” families in Gaza are grieving lost children and shattered homes. The asymmetry of their suffering cries out. How can we honor the Trinity – the God who is relationship and community – and not lament the broken relationships and community in the Holy Land? The Triune God who created all people in the divine image weeps over each life lost, especially on all sides of Abraham’s complicated family tree. To worship this God is to let our hearts be broken with the things that break God’s heart. It also means imagining and working for alternatives: ceasefires, dialogues, justice, and healing – however impossible they seem – because our prophetic imagination refuses to accept that violence and division are the final word.
Or take the plight of immigrant communities in Los Angeles and other U.S. cities. Lately, there have been waves of ICE raids, terrifying predawn operations that round up undocumented neighbors like criminals. Parents drop their kids at school not knowing if a deportation sweep will leave those children orphaned by afternoon. The Trinity teaches us that persons belong with persons – that separation is anathema to God. How then can we not stand up for families being torn apart? To live the Trinity exoterically might mean volunteering with an immigrants’ rights group, accompanying someone to a court hearing, or as simple an act as befriending a newcomer who faces loneliness and fear. It means saying, in effect, “Your family is my family, your suffering is not yours alone – we bear it together.” That is solidarity – love with its work boots on. It’s the outward expression of the inward grace we’ve received.
Even in the natural world, we see groaning and need. The climate crisis threatens the magnificent “very good” creation that the Triune God declared in the beginning. Record heat waves, wildfires, and storms are battering the earth. Just last fall in my own city of Asheville, we experienced Hurricane Helene, a storm of almost biblical proportions. In late September it stalled over the Appalachians and dumped record-breaking rains, causing devastating floods and mudslides across western North Carolina. It was the deadliest, costliest natural disaster in our state’s history. Entire communities were cut off, without power or clean water for weeks. Yet in that valley of shadows, I also witnessed something holy: neighbors becoming the answer to each other’s prayers. While FEMA and Red Cross did their part, much of the real recovery was grassroots. Local mutual aid groups and churches popped up as relief hubs.
One example is BeLoved Asheville, a scrappy community nonprofit long dedicated to the under-served. In Helene’s aftermath, BeLoved volunteers went street by street with food, blankets, potable water, and medical care for those who couldn’t access a shelter. National media cameras eventually moved on, but the local work continues: rebuilding homes, providing counseling for trauma, advocating for those who lost everything. Six months later, when network TV did revisit, they spotlighted how groups like BeLoved were “stepping up to help those in need”, and how people across the country could contribute. It was a striking image of community organizing as an expression of love. I recall one morning standing in a distribution center – it was actually a repurposed church fellowship hall – watching volunteers cook hot meals while others sorted donated diapers and toiletries. A diverse bunch – college students, off-duty firefighters, trans anarchist organizers, old hippie farmers – all working side by side, laughing and crying and passing out supplies. It hit me: This is church. This is Trinity-in-action. It’s messy, but it’s incarnation – love taking on flesh in the here and now.
In moments like that, I hear the resonance of Walter Brueggemann’s words and legacy. Walter – a towering Old Testament scholar and humble servant of God’s Word – departed this life recently, leaving us a treasury of insight. One of his most famous ideas is the “prophetic imagination”, which he defined as the calling to “nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the… dominant culture around us.” We honor Walter’s memory by refusing to accept the cynicism and despair of our age. He reminded us that every empire wants us either numb or hopeless – because if we can’t imagine a different world, we’ll never work for it. But the prophets – and I’d add, the trinitarian mystics and saints – dare to imagine God’s “reign” on earth as it is in heaven. They hold onto God’s dream of shalom: swords fashioned into plowshares, deserts blooming, exiles coming home, tables big enough for everyone. Brueggemann also spoke of preaching as “dangerous work” because truly prophetic preaching demands an “epistemological break” from the lies of the status quo. It’s emancipatory in that it frees our minds from what we thought was inevitable (say, endless war or poverty) and proclaims, “Another way is possible!” I can’t think of a more trinitarian task. Father, Son, and Spirit – that divine community of hope – is always inviting us toward New Creation, toward liberation. When we join in acts of justice, when we protect the vulnerable, when we speak truth in love to those in power, we are, in effect, preaching with our lives. We become the continuation of that prophetic tradition Walter championed – a people who do not flinch from the world’s pain, yet also refuse to accept that pain as permanent. We become sacraments of the Trinity’s restorative love in the world. Walter often signed off his emails and lectures with an exhortation to “Keep imagining!” – and that is exactly what we must do, in prayerful action, as we face today’s crises.
It strikes me that Trinity Sunday 2025 (Year C in the lectionary) gave us Romans 5 as a reading, and in it Paul says, “we even boast in our afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance… and hope does not disappoint us.” How audacious is that? Boasting in affliction! It’s not a masochistic thing – it’s that Way-faring hope knows suffering isn’t the end of the story. Why? Paul continues, “because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.” The Trinity’s love on the inside empowers us to face the suffering on the outside without losing hope. That hope is not wishful thinking; it’s the prophetic imagination at work. It allows us to persevere in loving action, to “show up” again and again at the world’s broken places – with endurance that leads to character, Paul says, and a character that leads to hope. We’ve seen glimpses of that hope: in Gaza ceasefire movements, in immigrant youth (DREAMers) who refuse to stop dreaming, in climate activists planting trees in flooded neighborhoods and in the creative, urgent street theatre of Extinction Rebellion. We see it whenever communities rebuild after tragedy, refusing to abandon one another. This is the Trinity’s footprint in our world. It looks like solidarity and mutual aid. It looks like prophetic protest and courageous peacemaking. It looks like ordinary people doing outrageously loving things, because they know in their bones that all people are one body: God’s, and we truly belong to each other.
So, dear ones, as we mark Trinity Sunday, let’s take it personally and politically. Let’s allow this oft-neglected feast to become a way of life for the months ahead.
Take a deep breath of the Spirit – drink in the reality that at the center of the universe is a Relationship that holds you.
Let that divine Threefold Love calm your anxieties and heal some wounded places in your soul.
Then look around at the people in your life – family, friends, coworkers, even the difficult ones – and remember, you’re all invited to the same table.
Practice a little extra compassion, a little extra patience, maybe even risk a new vulnerability in your connections. The mesoteric Trinitarian path might be as simple as asking someone, “How are you really doing?” and being fully present to their answer. And finally, open your eyes to the wider world. Is there a local struggle or a global crisis that tugs at your heart? Don’t push it aside as “too big” – that tug may be the Spirit’s prompting. Pray about it, yes, but also consider one concrete action. Maybe it’s donating or volunteering, maybe it’s writing a letter to a lawmaker, maybe it’s joining a peaceful vigil or simply educating yourself and others. Whatever you do, know that you never do it alone. The Trinity goes with you – the very Life of God is energizing your humble actions. The Perichoretic ‘Circle Dance’ of all-encompassing Love is already out there on the streets, in the shelters, at the borders, in the hospitals, working anonymously through millions of unsung heroes. Go join them. Join us! This is the opti-mystic way – optimistic mysticism that prays as if everything depends on God and works as if everything depends on us, all the while knowing it’s Grace from start to finish.
Trinity Sunday may not come with catchy customs or colored lights, but it offers something far better: a recalibration of our lives to the heartbeat of God’s love. It’s a yearly reminder – an invitation – to dance.
To dance inwardly with the Divine, to dance together with our neighbors, and to dance into the world’s pain with hope and courage. As we enter the long green season of Ordinary Time, may we not lapse into ordinary complacency. Instead, empowered by the extraordinary love at the center of the Trinity, may we dream and do extraordinary things. In memory of Walter Brueggemann, let’s nurture that alternative consciousness – that prophetic, trinitarian imagination – and dare to believe that another world is possible. Because the One who is Three is at work even now, “making all things new.” And we – all of us – have a standing invitation to take our place at the table of this transforming, triune love.
So come, take a seat. Taste and see. The dance is just beginning, and there’s space for you.
Grace and peace in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Amen.
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