My friend Mirabai Starr is gifted with the ability to deliver the teachings of the mystics straight to our hearts. Here is what she says about Julian of Norwich:
The medieval English anchoress Julian of Norwich bequeathed us a radically optimistic theology. She had no problem admitting that human beings have a tendency to go astray. We rupture relationships, dishonor the Divine, make unfortunate choices, and try to hide our faults. And yet, Julian insists, “All will be well and all will be well and every kind of thing shall be well.” [1]
Take that in.
This assertion is meant to penetrate the fog of our despair and wake us up. . . . Julian repeats her declaration three times—most emphatically the third: All will be well and all will be well and every kind of thing shall be well. She does not ask us to . . . [relegate] everything that unfolds to the will of God, calling it perfect against all evidence to the contrary. She squarely faces the inevitability that we will miss the mark [what Julian calls “sin”] and that there is wickedness in this world. Even so, she is convinced that the nature of the Divine is loving-kindness, and she wants us to absorb this into every fiber of our being.
In her mystical masterwork The Showings, Julian shares that she used to obsess about sin. She couldn’t figure out why God, who is all-powerful, wouldn’t have eliminated our negative proclivities when he made the world. “If he had left sin out of creation, it seemed to me, all would be well.” But what God-the-Mother showed Julian in a near-death vision [during her thirteenth revelation] was that all shall be well anyway. Not in spite of our transgressions but because of them. [Or, as I like to say,we come to God, not by doing it right, but by doing it wrong. —RR]
Julian unpacks this for us [in chapter 27]. In doing so she dispenses with the whole concept of sin and replaces it with love. “I believe that sin has no substance,” Julian writes, “not a particle of being.” While sin itself has no existential value, it has impact. It causes pain. It is the pain that has substance.
But mercy is swiftly forthcoming. It is immediately available. Inexorable! It is frankly rude of us to doubt that all will be well. . . . “When he said these gentle words,” Julian writes, speaking of God-the-Mother, “he showed me that he does not have one iota of blame for me, or for any other person. So, wouldn’t it be unkind of me to blame God for my transgressions since he does not blame me?” The merciful nature of God renders the whole blame game obsolete. . . . In fact, it is when we stumble that the Divine looks most tenderly upon us. Our vulnerability is beautiful to God-the-Mother.
Gateway to Action & Contemplation: What word or phrase resonates with or challenges me? What sensations do I notice in my body? What is mine to do?
Author and Episcopal priest Mary Earle explores the difficult questions that beset individuals during Julian’s time as well as our own. She writes,
In a social and cultural context [the fourteenth century was] so saturated with suffering and death, it is no wonder that many believers interpreted these [plagues] as clear signs of God’s anger with humanity. (Certainly, we still see vestiges of this way of interpreting events) . . . The underlying theology draws on a medieval doctrine known as substitutionary atonement . . . [which] held (as it still does today) that because of our many sins, we owe God a debt we can never repay—our burden of debt is so vast and we are finite. That is why Jesus, by dying on the cross, offers himself . . . as a sacrifice in order to satisfy the Father’s wrath. It is easy to see how this theology in its crudest form evolved into a belief in an angry and vengeful God, visiting humanity with punishing events. [1]
Thus in Julian’s day popular devotional art often depicted horrific scenes of the Last Judgment, scenes in which souls were being cast into hell, tortured endlessly by devils. Laymen and [lay]women of the fourteenth century would have constantly been wrestling with the “Why?” of suffering and the wrath of God. . . . When someone receives a terminal diagnosis, or a sudden death occurs, or a natural disaster devastates a region, the first question that occurs is usually, “Why me?”. . . The context out of which Julian writes, although in some ways so remote from our own, is one full of universal questions and themes. . . .
One of Julian’s most radical insights, with which I fully concur, is that there can be no wrath in God. Mary Earle continues,
Julian’s radical insistence that we know there is “no anger in God” [2] directs us all to look at ways in which we project our own bitterness, anger, and vengeance upon God. In a resolutely maternal way, she encourages us to grow up, to cast aside our immature and punitive images of God, and to be honest with ourselves about our own actions that have their roots in spiritual blindness. . . .
Julian tells us, again and again, in a variety of ways, that God is our friend, our mother and our father, as close to us as the clothing we wear. She employs homely imagery and language, the vocabulary of domesticity, to tell us her experience. At the same time, she demonstrates a degree of sophisticated theological language. Julian is firm and steady on these points:
God is One.
Everything is in God.
God is in everything.
God transcends and encloses all that is made.
The only point I would add to that list from my own study of Julian is that she really believes that God is Love.
Author
and Episcopal priest Mary Earle explores the difficult questions that beset
individuals during Julian’s time as well as our own. She writes,
In a social and cultural context [the fourteenth century was] so saturated with suffering and death, it is no wonder that many believers interpreted these as clear signs of God’s anger with humanity. (Certainly, we still see vestiges of this way of interpreting events) . . . The underlying theology draws on a medieval doctrine known as substitutionary atonement . . . [which] held (as it still does today) that because of our many sins, we owe God a debt we can never repay—our burden of debt is so vast and we are finite. That is why Jesus, by dying on the cross, offers himself . . . as a sacrifice in order to satisfy the Father’s wrath. It is easy to see how this theology in its crudest form evolved into a belief in an angry and vengeful God, visiting humanity with punishing events. [1]
Thus
in Julian’s day popular devotional art often depicted horrific scenes of the
Last Judgment, scenes in which souls were being cast into hell, tortured
endlessly by devils. Laymen and [lay]women of the fourteenth century would have
constantly been wrestling with the “Why?” of suffering and the wrath of God. .
. . When someone receives a terminal diagnosis, or a sudden death occurs, or a
natural disaster devastates a region, the first question that occurs is usually,
“Why me?”. . . The context out of which Julian writes, although in some ways so
remote from our own, is one full of universal questions and themes. . . .
One of Julian’s
most radical insights, with which I fully concur, is that there can be no wrath
in God. Mary Earle continues,
Julian’s
radical insistence that we know there is “no anger in God” [2] directs us all
to look at ways in which we project our own bitterness, anger, and vengeance
upon God. In a resolutely maternal way, she encourages us to grow up, to cast
aside our immature and punitive images of God, and to be honest with ourselves
about our own actions that have their roots in spiritual blindness. . . .
Julian
tells us, again and again, in a variety of ways, that God is our friend, our
mother and our father, as close to us as the clothing we wear. She employs
homely imagery and language, the vocabulary of domesticity, to tell us her
experience. At the same time, she demonstrates a degree of sophisticated
theological language. Julian is firm and steady on these points:
God is One.
Everything is in God.
God is in everything.
God transcends and encloses
all that is made.
The only point I
would add to that list from my own study of Julian is that she really believes
that God is Love.
In Chapter 54 of Julian’s Showings, we find what I consider the best description I have read of the union of the soul inside of the Trinity. Julian writes, “[God] makes no distinction in love between the blessed soul of Christ and the least soul that will be saved.” [1] God can only see Christ in us, it seems, because we are the extended Body of Christ in space and time. Christ is what God sees and cannot not love and draw us back into the Divine Dance of Love. Julian continues:
And I saw no difference between God and our substance, but, as it were, all God; and still my understanding accepted that our substance is in God, that is to say that God is God, and our substance is a creature in God. For the almighty truth of the Trinity is our Father, for he made us and keeps us in him. And the deep wisdom of the Trinity is our Mother, in whom we are enclosed. And the high goodness of the Trinity is our Lord, and in him we are enclosed and he in us. [emphasis mine —RR). [2]
Describing God as both mother and father was quite daring in Julian’s time. She called Jesus our “true Mother” from whom we receive our beginning, our true being, protection, and love. Even in terms of gender, mystics tend to be expansive. In chapter 59 she reflects:
Our high Father almighty God, who is Being, he knew us and loved us from before-any-time. Of which knowing, in his full marvelous deep Charity, by the foreseeing endless counsel of all the blessed Trinity, he willed that the second Person should become our Mother, our Brother, and our Saviour.
Whereof it follows that as truly as God is our Father, so truly is God our Mother. Our Father wills, our Mother works, our good Lord the Holy Ghost confirms. And therefore it belongs to us to love our God, in whom we have our being . . . for in these three is all our life. . . .
And therein is a forth-spreading, by the same grace, of a length and breadth, of a height and a deepness without end [see Ephesians 3:18–19]. And all is one love. [3]
After spending years contemplating her visions, Julian finishes her text with this confident description of God’s meaning:
So I was taught that love is our Lord’s meaning. And I saw very certainly in this and in everything that before God made us [God] loved us, which love was never abated and never will be. And in this love . . . [God] made all things profitable to us, and in this love our life is everlasting. . . . In this love we have our beginning, and all this shall we see in God without end. [4]
The
place which Jesus takes in our soul he will nevermore vacate, for in us is his
home of homes, and it is the greatest delight for him to dwell there. . . . And
the soul who contemplates this is made like [the one] who is contemplated. —Julian of Norwich
On that day, you
will know that you are in me and I am in you. —John 14:20
“That
day” promised in John’s Gospel has been a long time in coming, yet it has been
the enduring message of every great religion in history. It is the Perennial Tradition. Divine and thus universal
union is still the core message and promise—the whole goal and the entire point
of all religion.
Lady
Julian of Norwich uses the idea of “oneing” to describe divine union. In
chapter 53 of Revelations of
Divine Love, she writes,
“This beloved soul was preciously knitted to God in its making, by a knot so
subtle and so mighty that it is oned in God. In this oneing, it is made
endlessly holy. Furthermore, God wants us to know that all the souls which will
be saved in heaven without end are knit in this knot, and oned in this oneing,
and made holy in this holiness.” [1]
Julian
observes, “If I pay special attention to myself, I am nothing at all; but in
general, I am, I hope, in the unity of love . . . for it is in this oneing that
the life of all people consists”. . . . [2] She reflects: “The love of God
creates in us such a oneing that when it is truly seen, no person can separate
themselves from another.” [3] Finally, let us hear Julian in her own Middle
English words, speaking of divine and human unity: “For in the sighte of God
alle man is one man, and one man is alle man.”[4]
This
is not some 21st-century leap of logic. This is not pantheism or mere “New Age”
optimism. This is the whole point! Radical union is the recurring experience of
the saints and mystics of all religions. We do not have to discover or prove
it; we only have to retrieve what has been re-discovered—and enjoyed, again and
again—by those who desire and seek God and love. When you think you have
“discovered” it, you will be just like Jacob “when he awoke from his sleep” and
shouted, “You were here all the time, and I never knew it!” (Genesis 28:16).
As John states in his first Letter, “I do not write to you because you do not know the truth, I am writing to you here because you know it already”! (1 John 2:21; my emphasis). Like John, I can only convince you of spiritual things because your soul already knows what is true, and that is why I believe and trust Julian’s showings, too. For the mystics, there is only one Knower, and we just participate in that One Spirit.
Recently I have again been reading Lady Julian of Norwich (1342-1416), one of my all-time favorite mystics. Each time I return to her writings, I always find something new.
Julian experienced her sixteen visions, or “showings” as she called them, all on one May night in 1373 when she was very sick and near death. As a priest held a crucifix in front of her, Julian saw Jesus suffering on the cross and heard him speaking to her for several hours. Like all mystics, she realized that what Jesus was saying about himself, he was simultaneously saying about all of reality. That is what unitive consciousness allows you to see.
Afterwards, Julian felt the need to go apart and reflect on her profound experience. She asked the bishop to enclose her in an anchor-hold, built against the side of St. Julian’s Church in Norwich, England. Julian was later named after that church. We do not know her real name, since she never signed her writing. (Talk about loss of ego!) The anchor-hold had a window into the church that allowed Julian to attend Mass and another window so she could counsel and pray over people who came to visit her. Such anchor-holds were found all over 13th- and 14th-century Europe.
Julian first wrote a short text about the showings, but then she patiently spent twenty years in contemplation and prayer, trusting God to help her discern the deeper meanings to be found in the visions. Finally, she wrote a longer text, titled Revelations of Divine Love. Julian’s interpretation of her God-experience is unlike the religious views common for most of history up to her time. It is not based in sin, shame, guilt, fear of God or hell. Instead, it is full of delight, freedom, intimacy, and cosmic hope. How did she retain such freedom, we ask? Maybe and precisely because she was not a priest, ordained to speak the party line?
As I read her words this time, what strikes me is the similarity between Julian’s time and our own. Here is how author, scholar, and Episcopal priest Mary Earle describes Julian’s fourteenth-century context:
Julian lived at a time of vast social, [religious,] and political upheaval, incessant wars, and sweeping epidemics. Norwich, with a population of around 25,000 by 1330 . . . was struck viciously by the plague known as the Black Death. At its peak in the late 1340s in England, it killed approximately three-fourths of the population of Norwich. A young girl at this time, Julian was certainly affected in untold ways by this devastation. When the plague returned, she was about nineteen. . . . [1]
In her anchor-hold, Julian may have recognized the potential spiritual benefits of “social distancing” during a time of crisis, such as the awakened ability through solitude to be personally present to divine love. Yet we must remember that she also let God’s love flow right through her to those on the street requesting her counsel, and to us through her writings.
A Perennial Wisdom Monday, May 11, 2020
Although Julian of Norwich is an anonymous woman who lived over 600 years ago, seekers and scholars return to her “showings” again and again. Author Veronica Mary Rolf describes why Julian’s wisdom is perennial, valuable, and needed whenever there is confusion and suffering, which is to say, in every time and place. Rolf writes:
Perhaps the best answer to the question “Why Julian now?” is that in our age of uncertainty, inconceivable suffering, and seemingly perpetual violence and war (not unlike fourteenth-century Europe), Julian shows us the way toward contemplative peace. . . . In a world of deadly diseases and ecological disasters, Julian teaches us how to endure pain in patience and trust that Christ is working to transform every cross into resurrected glory. . . .
Moreover, across six centuries, Julian’s voice speaks to us about love. She communicates personally, as if she were very much with us here and now. Even more than theological explanations, we all hunger for love. Our hearts yearn for someone we can trust absolutely—divine love that can never fail. Julian reveals this love because, like Mary Magdalene, she experienced it firsthand. . . .
Precisely because she had the courage of her convictions, Julian of Norwich became the first woman ever to write a book in the English language. . . . Even more, this “unlettered” woman developed a mystical theology that was second to none during the fourteenth century and that continues to break barriers in our own time. . . .
Julian is also emotionally raw, often tempted by self-doubt and discouragement, yet constantly renewed in hope. She does something extremely dangerous for a layperson living in the fourteenth century: she discloses her conflict between the predominant medieval idea of a judgmental and wrathful God and her direct experience of the unconditional love of Christ on the cross. . . .
Why is Julian so appealing today? I think because she is totally vulnerable and transparently honest, without any guile. She is “homely”; in medieval terms, that means down-to-earth, familiar, and easily accessible. She is keenly aware of her spiritual brokenness and longs to be healed. So do we. She experiences great suffering of body, mind, and soul. So do we. She has moments of doubt. So do we. She seeks answers to age-old questions. So do we. Then, at a critical turning point in her revelations, she is overwhelmed by joy and “gramercy” (great thanks) for the graces she is receiving. We, too, are suddenly granted graces and filled to overflowing with gratitude. Sometimes, we even experience our own divine revelations.
Again, and again, Julian reassures each one of us that we are loved by God, unconditionally. In her writings, we hear Christ telling us, just as he told Julian, “I love you and you love me, and our love shall never be separated in two.” [1]
A contemplative person is someone who knows that they don’t know everything and trusts that they are being held by something much larger, wiser, and more loving than themselves. It is these very qualities that enable them to act on behalf of others and communities in need. CAC faculty member Barbara Holmes offers some insights as to how and why this is true, particularly in moments of crisis:
The world is the cloister of the contemplative. There is no escape. Always the quest for justice draws one deeply into the heart of God. In this sacred interiority, contemplation becomes the language of prayer and the impetus for prophetic proclamation and action.
Contemplation plugs the supplicant into the catalytic center of God’s Spirit, into the divine power that permeates every aspect of life. In this space, there are no false dichotomies, no divisions between the sacred and the secular. . . . Through acts of contemplation, individuals and congregations enter the liminal space where the impossible becomes possible.
A community is not always an intentional gathering . . . sometimes communities form because unpredictable events and circumstances draw people into shared life intersections. . . . Communities form when ego-focused concerns recede in favor of shared agendas and a more universal identity. These relationships need only hold together briefly before transitioning into other forms; however, while they are intact, all concerned are aware of the linkages of interior resolve that are at work.
As with all great social justice movements, there came a time [in the Civil Rights Movement] when worship practices and communal resolve coalesced, and an interfaith, interdenominational, interracial community formed. The commonality for this dissenting community was the willingness to resist the power of apartheid in the Americas with their bodies.
The formation of community during the Civil Rights Movement was the quintessential coming-of-age story for Africana people. During a particular time in history, nonviolent initiatives seeded with contemplative worship practices became acts of public theology and activism. Activism and contemplation are not functional opposites. Rather, contemplation is at its heart a reflective activity that is always seeking the spiritual balance between individual piety and communal justice-seeking.
Who could have predicted that America’s apartheid would fall as decisively as the walls of Jericho, when the people marched around the bastions of power carrying little more than their faith and resolve? How audacious it is to take what is given—the remnants of a chattel community, the vague memories of mother Africa, and a desperate need to be free—and translate those wisps into a multicultural, multivalent liberative vision of community. The idea of a beloved community emerged from the deeply contemplative activities of a besieged people.
In the midst of the social distancing necessitated by this pandemic, people have nevertheless come together in creative and loving ways. Some have called this virus a massive “trigger event” with the potential to change everything. As individuals and communities, we can respond with justice and compassion, or we can double down on the pursuit of accumulation and power, with no more than a return to business as usual.
Jesus’ experience of divine kinship, which Beatrice Bruteau described yesterday, naturally led to the creation of equitable community. His community was very different than the larger society in which he lived—and the individualistic, largely unfettered capitalist society in which we live today. In fact, Jesus’ community looks very similar to networks of mutual aid which are springing up to help one another during this global pandemic. In the midst of crisis, people often begin to rely on others more—whether neighbors, local organizations, or even online communities—for physical, emotional, and psychological support. By giving what we can and receiving what we need, we build relationships that last.Bruteau continues:
The total social program that Jesus advocated was based on communion, friendship, distribution, and partnership. This contrasts with a social organization based on domination, exploitation, accumulation, and force. His program’s central principle is equality, just as the contrasting paradigm’s principle is inequality. The latter is vertically ordered by “power over.” The former is horizontally ordered by sharing and mutual care. Even what might have been a vertical dimension—the power of God over all—is developed [through Jesus] in a horizontal way by the distributed Spirit indwelling each social entity (individual, family, local community, the whole people). This distribution of the God-expressing Spirit implies that people must be in active partnership with God at all points.
This is the “covenant” idea: contribution, responsibility, and care work both ways, in the context of equality and mutual respect. There is no “social status.” . . . All persons are respected equally, while particular gifts and expertise organize collective activity appropriately for the benefit of all. The people are committed to one another and pledge to care for the other as one cares for oneself. “Benefit of all” is a real incentive, a strong motivator. . . .
These ideas and their accompanying feelings . . . cannot be imposed on people. They have to emerge in a natural and spontaneous way. The thesis is that all people have such feelings, at least the propensity for them, and vaguely the desire to let them surface and operate, but they are discouraged from showing and fulfilling them by [dominant] social systems. . . . Occasionally individuals appear who have broken free from the prevailing culture and who can give opportunity to others to be free. If they can come together, they can form a community that welcomes newcomers and grows. Their cooperative lifestyle makes for stronger community unity than the selfishness, suspicion, competition, and hostility of the lifestyle they have left behind.
The type of community that Beatrice Bruteau describes is an essential part of the Jesus “program.” It flows naturally from the recognition of God’s presence within each and every individual and all of creation. How could we, who have God’s Spirit within us, ever rob, cheat, oppress, or harm others, within whom the Spirit also dwells?
Matthew 25:35-46 ….For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’ 37 “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’ 40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’ 41 “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’ 44 “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’ 45 “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’ 46 “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”
Jesus’ intimacy with the nature of God as relationship inspired him to redefine the boundaries of family and tribe. Jesus extended kinship to everyone. Author and scholar Beatrice Bruteau (1930–2014) looks to Jesus for a fundamental understanding of what it means to be Christian community:
Jesus had a fundamental vision—faith that all people [emphasis mine] are “children of God.” This is the theological perspective of his “program,” on which everything else rests. I am supposing that he took this seriously, more or less literally, . . . teaching that each person has an uncreated soul that is actually a continuation of the Divine Life itself. When he met a person, therefore, he really believed that God was somehow present in that person, so he looked for that presence through all the overlying contradictions to it, until he found it. Then he addressed himself to that point in the person. As the Hindus also say, the divine in him saluted the divine in the other. When anyone does that, it tends to awaken the divine in the other, who is thus invited to speak from that place in return. [Notice the mutuality! It begins with one person’s generous gaze, which is then returned in kind.] This is the sort of thing we will need to accustom ourselves to doing if we are to succeed in developing the further levels of the [Jesus] program. . . .
[One of the images of] Jesus’ friendship community in which there are no lords or servants . . . was the family and the extended kinship [network]. . . . There are no sexual, racial, or historical barriers to membership in this family. Its intention is to include everyone. But this does not mean that it has no structure, no principles, no operating dynamic. It has these with great clarity, especially since they are all simple and even obvious, once the basic principle of social and personal equality has been seen and accepted. . . .
Once you see the basic truth, he might insist, that we are all God’s children and therefore absolutely equal, the rest of it is just common sense. You don’t need a divine teacher to spell it out for you, much less to set up a new battery of regulations and sanctions. You can make all the deductions and applications yourself and you will live by them because you see the truth and genuinely want to live that way.
Richard again: I believe most Christians have good intentions to follow Jesus’ example, but they are quickly overrun by the “me-first” norms of mainstream culture. In moments of crisis, however, we seem to tap into something deeper and truer. We remember our kinship with one another. In the first weeks of the pandemic, I heard media reports of hoarding and price gouging, but I have heard far more stories of generosity, courage, compassion, and sacrifice for the sake of others. We do not all have the same gifts, but many seem to be giving their very best.
A divine foundation of relationship is what all religion,
spirituality, and perhaps even politics, is aiming for. The Trinity offers us
this precise gift—a grounded connection with God, self, others, and the world.
This ancient doctrine dared to affirm that God is relationship itself. The way of Jesus therefore
is an invitation to a way of living, loving, and relating—on earth as it is in
God. We are intrinsically like the Trinity, living in absolute relatedness.
While we may not always recognize it, we are all together in a web of mutual
interdependence. When we recognize it on a spiritual level, we call it love.
The
12th-century mystic Richard of St. Victor (1123–1173) wrote about the Trinity
as a mutual, loving companionship of friends—a community, if you will. In my
book The Divine Dance, I summarized some of his
thinking: For God to be good, God can be one. For God to be loving, God has to
be two, because love is always a relationship. But for God to share “excellent
joy” and “delight” God has to be three, because supreme happiness is when two
persons share their common delight in a third something—together. [1] All we
need to do is witness a couple after the birth of their new baby, and we know
this is true.
The
people I have loved with great abandon and freedom were not just the people who
loved me, but people who loved what I loved. People who cared about community,
the Gospel, the poor, justice, honesty—this is where the flow was easy,
natural, and life-giving. Two people excited about the same thing are the
beginning of almost everything new, creative, and risky in our world. Surely
this is what Jesus meant by his first and most basic definition of church as
“two or three gathered” (Matthew 18:20).
A
community inspired by the Trinity will be a community of people who treat each
other as subjects and not objects. Just as the persons of the Trinity know and
love one another, from God’s side we are always known and loved subject to subject. God and the human person must know one another center to
center, subject to subject, and never subject to object. This is why there is
no seeking of power over in the Trinity, but only power with—a giving away, a sharing, a letting go, and thus an
infinity of trust and mutuality. This has the power to change all relationships:
in marriage, in culture, and even in international relations.
If we believe in
a Trinitarian God, then we must hold fast to the truth that Godis community—a completely
loving, mutually self-giving, endlessly generative relationship between equal
partners. We are included in that community and so is everyone else! A
Trinitarian image of God should have changed our politics, our gender
relationships, all power differentials, and friendship itself. But most of
Christian history was never practically Trinitarian.
This CO2- (Church Of 2) is where two guys meet each day to tighten up our Connections with Jesus. We start by placing the daily “My Utmost For His Highest” in this WordPress blog. Then we prayerfully select some matching worship music and usually pick out a few lyrics that fit especially well. Then we just start praying and editing and Bolding and adding comments and see where the Spirit takes us.
It’s been a blessing for both of us.
If you’d like to start a CO2, we’d be glad to help you and your partner get started. Also click the link below to see how others are doing CO2.Odds Monkey
Click Image for John White's Original Vision For CO2's
