On Trinity Sunday, I took us on a journey to Cappadocia, Konya, Kars — three points on Anatolian soil. I introduced you to three voices singing the mistunderstood Trinitarian mystery, in three distinct keys.
Today, I’m going to make the case that voices like these are in fact singing a three-party harmony, inviting us deeper into this Divine Dance of creation, cosmos, and communion.
While I might employ some lyrics that sound unfamiliar to ears dulled by the twin monotonies of fundamentalist religion and secular materialism, you don’t need a theology degree to fathom the gist. Your only requirement is a heart that has loved and been left…which is to say, only a heart.
The first voice — let’s call it the Cappadocian–Zizioulas voice — says: Each dancer is real. You are not an interchangeable part. The persons of the Trinity are not three masks covering one bored actor; they are genuinely distinct, vulnerably turned-toward each other, and their distinctiveness is not a problem to be dissolved into oneness but the very thing that makes this love love. This is the conviction Richard Rohr and I kept circling in The Divine Dance: Whatever is going on in God is “a flow, a radical relatedness, a perfect communion between Three.” God, the old mystics dared to say, is not merely a dancer but the dance itself. Apply this to your own life and it lands like a blow and a blessing at once: as Pope Leo affirms in his ground-breaking encyclical Magnifica Humanitas — issued, of all the providential timing, the very week I began this series — each of us is irreducible, “a face not merely a function,” never to be flattened into “data and performance.” You are not a smudge of generic humanity. You are a particular, peculiar, unrepeatable face: and you become more yourself, not less, the more deeply you give yourself away.
The dancers are real, and the steps are kenotic.
The second voice is Catherine LaCugna — a Catholic theologian who, in 1991, almost single-handedly hauled the Trinity back from the West’s museum and put this Divine dynamism to work. In her paradigm-shifting God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life, LaCugna traces how, over a thousand years, we let this doctrine “defeat” itself: we split God into an inner life of commuion that no one could percieve and an outer life of redemption, whose impacts we could observe. And then we became fascinated by the inner one — speculating about the private mathematics of the Godhead while the world burned. But as I’ve noted elsewhere, God, in God’s Trinitarian unfoldment, is not a math problem. LaCugna’s prophetic correction is bracingly simple: there is only one dance. There is no secret divine ballet happening behind a curtain that we’re meant to admire from our seats. There is one single movement of self-giving love that begins in the depths of God, becomes flesh in Jesus, breathes out as Spirit, and sweeps through the whole creation — and we are already in it.
You’re on the floor. You were on the floor before you heard the music.
And here is where LaCugna gets her teeth. If there is only one dance, then whoever gets shoved to the edge of the dance floor exposes a lie about the self-appointed bouncers. The personal is political, she said — shifting this sentiment from slogan to a Trinitarian song. Every structure that humiliates, every wall that says you can look but you cannot touch, every arrangement that ranks some of God’s faces above others — these aren’t merely unkind; they’re walking heresies with skin on. They tell a lie about who God is. Because the God revealed in the Feast of Holy Trinity is the God Whose very Being is the refusal to hoard, the refusal to exclude, the Endless making-room.
LaCugna drew the curve. She bent those two old circles — the inner and the outer God — into one great arc sweeping across all times and worlds. But she drew it, by her own admission, with the tools mainstream Western theology handed her, and those tools could only take her so far. She could trace the shape of the curve. She couldn’t quite say what the curve was made of. For this, we need to go back to the trickster-sage from Kars.
The third voice, then, is Bourgeault‘s — and through her, Gurdjieff‘s, and behind them both, oddly enough, a Renaissance shoemaker named Jacob Boehme. At the final keynote address last fall in Gyumri, at Armenia’s Black Fortress, Cynthia Bourgeault makes a claim about Gurdjieff so audacious it should come with a seatbelt: that the wild man of Kars may be the finest Trinitarian theologian Christianity ever produced. Not despite his strangeness but because of it. In the adroit hands of Gurdjieff and his Fourth Way students — philsophers and builders, artists and engineers, composers and gardners because he stopped treating the Trinity as a speculation about God’s private inner life and recast it as a cosmogonic template, a pattern for how anything new comes to be, at any scale, in any realm. The ongoing impact of Gurdjieff’s Sacred Triamazikamno or Law of Universe Creation “gives the Trinity legs,” she says in her accompanying essay for the recent Special Gurdjieff Issue of the Journal of the Sydney Society of Literature and Aesthetics. He made this immobilized doctrine get up and walk. And what this third voice adds is the aspect the other two leave out:
The dance is going somewhere.
Trinity isn’t like a record on a turntable, spinning forever in place. It is a parabola — a great arc that descends all the way down into matter, into time, into the particular constraint of a body and a death, reaching its lowest and densest point in Jesus, and from this hinge begins to rise again, carrying everything it gathered on the way down. In the pages of The Eye of the Heart Bourgeault calls this “blueshift,” overturning the old, weary religious tale in which spirit is up and clean and matter is down and dirty, turning planet earth into one giant escape room with Spirit found only past the exits. This is one of the worst ideas of so-called Gnosticism, unfortunately repeated and reified by Perennialism, especially in its Traditionalist school.
But No, says a stubborn stream of Incarnationist, Emmanuel God-with-us lovers, exemplified by the peculiar lineage Bourgeault highlights. God does not lose energy by plunging into form. The descent is the method, not a tragedy. The way down is the way home.
And here is the turn that should give us pause, recollection and repose. If the way down is the way home — if descent is the very method by which love becomes real — then someone has to pay the freight of all that descending. The cost is not some accident that befalls the dance partway through; the cost is written into the choreography from the first note. Bourgeault, reading Gurdjieff alongside old Boehme, puts it in a paragraph that struck me to my core, bringing my early evangelical atonement ardor, my mid-faith-compost atonement disintegration, and my contemporary atonement-curiosity as a parent and heartbroken human watching the world roil and convulse, full-circle:
“The crucifixion does not begin on the cross; it begins in the Trinity, that primordial djartklom, as the ineffable unity of divine knowledge and purpose willingly submits to its own drawing and quartering in order that anything at all can come into being. Gurdjieff has a deep feeling for the cosmogonic suffering involved here, which powerfully undergirds a good deal of his teaching, most succinctly and poignantly captured in his Fourth Obligolnian striving:
The striving, from the beginning of one’s existence, to pay as quickly as possible for one’s arising and individuality in order afterward to be free to lighten the sorrow of our Common Father.
If djartklom is thus the basic involutionary (i.e., incarnational) principle, then the unification of the three into one is the basic evolutionary mechanism. It is how we rise, how we pay the cost of our arising, how we lighten the sorrow of our common Father.”
It begins in the Trinity — in that primordial self-emptying by which the ineffable Unity submits to its own restraint, so that anything at all might come to be. Creation through self-limitation, reaching all the way into the cosmogonic heart of God.
Which is only the strange Seer of Patmos saying, in his own key, what he saw: the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. (Revelation 13:8) Not slain at Calvary as an emergency repair. Slain from the foundation — the wound coeval with the world, the self-giving older than time, the kenosis that is the act of creating.
So someone pays the freight. This Someone, thankfully, is the Risen and Crowned Lamb. And this someone, paradoxically, includes you.
Which is where this gets personal, and where it starts to cost something. More on this — and a table of grace that turned me away — next time.
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