And now we come to the dénouement in our trilogy on the Trinity. We began on the cosmogonic dance floor, and left off in vertigo — with a God who pays the freight of every descending, a Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. That’s a lot of cosmos to carry. So let me bring it all the way down now, down to mud and bread and a morning that should have been pure gift. Because if any of this is true, it has to be true at the scale of a body.
Your body. On a particular Tuesday. Like today.
Let me start with what the descending is for.
There’s a passage I’ve loved since childhood, from Margery Williams’ The Velveteen Rabbit, that says it better than all my theologizing possibly could:
“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day… “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time… Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
This is the blueshift in a nursery. Love happens to you slowly, at cost, by being handled and worn down and stayed-with until you are Real.
The descent is the method. It takes a long time, and it does sometimes hurt, and your eyes drop out — and none of this is the tragedy. It’s the becoming. Even, Cynthia Bourgeault would dare to say, for God.
I have watched this kind of Realness happen in my own valley.
When Hurricane Helene came through these mountains nearly two autumns ago and the water swept the roads and the power (and, in too many cases, the people), I stood one morning in a repurposed fellowship hall, watching college kids and off-duty firefighters and trans anarchist organizers and old church ladies cook and sort and carry, side-by-side, cutting up and tearing up. No one asked anyone for their papers. The energy ran straight up the line and straight back down it — food and money and muscle pouring in from the heights, and something else entirely rising back out of our flooded valley: a kind of fierce, attentive love the satellites couldn’t measure. This is church, I remember thinking, days since my last shower. This is the dance keeping the music going.
William Segal, the Fourth Way-inspired painter, called it the two-way street of a living cosmos:
“Without the upward transmission of energies through the intermediary of conscious attention, the universe would give in to entropy.”
And in different language:
“Giving and receiving, God speaks to man. Receiving and giving, man speaks to God.”
That morning, I witnessed this reciprocal-feeding made flesh in my own zip code. I played my own modest part, standing in mud-caked boots.
And I knew, in my body, what the dance is for.
Which is exactly why a different morning is etched in my memory.
Years ago, before dawn, my friend Carl McColman and I converged through the Georgia dark at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit.
Trappist monks in the choir loft. Photo by Kathryne Pusch.
We climbed up into the monastic choir loft — tucked right in among the Cistercians themselves, because their numbers had thinned and there was room — and chanted several Psalms as the sun rose through the stained glass, soaking the whole sanctuary in a slow, translucent purple. I have rarely felt so folded into something this ancient and warm.
I had every reason to feel at home in that loft. It was Carl who deepened my engagement with the Christian contemplative tradition after undergrad, and years later it would be Carl who handed me the words Richard and I would lean on in The Divine Dance to describe the Trinity as a “Round Dance” — words written by Brother Elias Marechal, a monk of this very house in Conyers. “An infinite current of love streams without ceasing,” Marechal wrote in Tears of an Innocent God: Conversations on Silence, Kindness, and Prayer, “to and fro, to and fro, to and fro.”
So there I was, chanting in the loft of the very people who would teach me the dance.
And then, they would not let me eat.
When the Eucharist was consecrated, I — not Catholic, not properly credentialed for that table — was not supposed to receive it. I stood with my arms crossed over my chest to receive a blessing instead of the bread, while the feast I had been singing toward all morning was carried right past me. You may chant the music. You may not join the dance.
I’m not telling you this to relitigate sacramental discipline; good and serious people hold these lines for reasons, however much I (and other good and serious people) might disagree. I’m telling you because of what it did in my chest. The current that streams without ceasing, to and fro, to and fro — dammed. At my crossed arms. I had just spent an hour being sung and prayed into an expression of Beloved Community, and then, at the central moment, shown the edge of the dance floor. And standing there, arms crossed, I felt in my own body the lie LaCugna was naming. Not a lie those gentle monks intended. A lie built into an arrangement — old and inherited and sincere — that nonetheless whispered something false about the God whose whole being is the refusal to eat alone.
Andrei Rublev, The Hospitality of Abraham (The Trinity). c. 1410–1427. Tempera on wood, 142 cm × 114 cm.
Because here is the detail Fr. Richard Rohr — my collaborator on The Divine Dance — loves to speculate about in Andrei Rublev’s great icon of the Trinity: the three figures bent toward each other around a single cup. In the original, there appears to be a small patch of glue on the front of the table, where something was once fixed and has since been lost. What’s a good guess as to the missing piece? A mirror. Arguably the most iconic icon that ever icon-ed was built to catch your own face and pull it into the circle. There is an empty place at that table, and it is pointedly, deliberately, yours.
The Blessed Trinity does not feast alone. The Three-in-One never has. The whole point of the three bent faces and the open fourth side is the radical hospitality of a God who is, in essence, making room.
So what do you do, standing at the edge of the floor with your arms crossed? You can curse the music. You can leave. Or you can let the ache itself become a kind of prayer — and let it teach you, in your own grieved body, exactly what the dance is for, and exactly what you will refuse to do to anyone else once you’re the one setting the Table. The exclusion, consciously borne and refused-to-be-passed-on, becomes food for the world.
That is the upward transmission. That is the offering only a conscious, willing, slightly heartbroken human being can make.
My friend Sara Miles tells the opposite story, the photographic negative of my own. One ordinary morning she wandered into St. Gregory of Nyssa’s Church in San Francisco — a queer, secular, war-reporter atheist with, by her own account, no earthly reason to be there — walking up to a table she knew nothing about, and putting a piece of fresh, crumbling bread into her mouth with no one questioning whether she belonged.
“Jesus happened to me,” is how she puts it. There was no velvet rope at that door. That was the scandal her future church had chosen: an open table, bread placed into the hands of whoever showed up hungry. She didn’t earn her way in. She wasn’t vetted or approved. She was simply fed — and it wrecked and remade her, and turned her into someone who has spent the years since feeding others by the thousands, both sacramentally and by the meal-ful. One open table, one mouthful of actual bread, and the whole machinery of who’s-in-and-who’s-out came apart in her hands. That is what the music sounds like when nobody is standing at the edge of the floor.
So what is the Trinity for?
Rainbow Rublev (2023), by Dani M. Jiménez.
The much-neglected Feast of the Holy Trinity opened, this year, on the very first page of Holy Writ: a wind from God sweeping over the face of the waters, a voice calling light out of the dark, and over and over the refrain — and God saw that it was good, it was good, it was very good. The readings ended, in Matthew, on a mountain, with eleven wobbling worshipers sent to baptize the nations into the threefold Name.
From the brooding-over-the-waters to the sending-into-the-streets: one single arc. One dance, descending and ascending. Matter called good at the start; flesh declared the very dwelling of God by the end.
And Paul, in between, almost throws it away as a farewell, the way you’d toss your keys on the table coming home: the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you. Grace, love, communion — three, and one, and with you. Not a formula to parse. A field to live inside.
So if you take nothing else from this strange feast, take this. The Trinity is not a math problem to be solved or a cabinet to be dusted. It is the announcement that reality itself is hospitable — that all the way down, beneath the molecules, the universe is shaped like a table with a mirror at the empty seat. As Dallas Willard gently insists in The Divine Conspiracy, “Jesus brings us the assurance that the universe is a perfectly safe place for us to be.”
So here is the whole trilogy, gathered into three sentences you could carry in a pocket:
The dancers are real — and you are one of them, a particular, unrepeatable face, never a smudge of generic creation.
There is only one Dance — and the edges of the floor, where someone stands with their arms crossed, are where the lies live.
And the dance is going somewhere — somewhere that, mysteriously, needs your particular feet on the floor; needs the fierce, attentive love only your conscious, willing, wounded attention can send back up the line, lightening the sorrow of our Common Father. Even as the Son shows fathomless solidarity with us. Even as the Spirit blows where she will — a fresh, reconciling wind.
They worshiped him, but they doubted. And he sent them anyway. He always does. The wobble was never the disqualification; it was the invitation.
So: come to the table you were told you couldn’t approach. Take the bread. Become Real — slowly, at cost, until most of your hair has been loved off. And then — this is the whole of it — make sure no one ever stands at the edge of your floor with their arms crossed again.
Mercy to us all.
PS: I hope this reflection is feeding you, friends. And if you’d like this feeding to be reciprocal, well…there will be an opportunity for us to give and receive even more in the days ahead. This trilogy is a kind of overture. For nearly a decade now (and where has the time gone?) since The Divine Dance’s release, I’ve been living with these questions, and they’ve grown — into Fourth Way ideas and practice, into the mystics and liberation artists, and into a way of belonging, beholding, becoming and bestowing that I can no longer constrain under previous containers. It’s like I’m discovering afresh (through serendipitous meetings with remarkable people, communities, books, and other angels-in-disguise) the abundant life which Jesus promises us, that somehow remains so elusive to so many of us.
In other words, something new is composting here. In the weeks ahead I’ll be harvesting this dear newsletter into its next form — a more thorough-going, weirder, more serious // yet more whimsical, deeper-rooted exploration of exactly this: the four-fold alienation we suffer (from the Sacred, from ourselves, from each other, from our world) and the slow, participatory work of inner, interpersonal, and cultural resurrection. I’m simply inviting a few pieces to fall into place — including commissioning brand-new iconic logo art from Andy Ristaino, an award-winning lead animator on Adventure Time and The Midnight Gospel!).
If I’ve learned one thing from this growth, and what this online community wishes to become, it’s that I can’t do this alone. There will be a way to regularly contribute a modest amount to help me bring these reflections (and their attendant practical exercises — which I’m naming Opti-Mystic Ways that Work) to you on a steadier basis. In the meantime, if you’d like to make a one-time contribution to these foundation-laying efforts, frankly it would be helpful in this season. You can send me anything you’d like via PayPal or Venmo. But no matter what, I want you here at the table when the mirror gets uncovered. Pull up a chair. There’s a seat with your name on it.
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