The Circle Dance of God
Father Richard writes that our images of God become more fluid as we grow in spiritual maturity:
God comes to each of us in unique ways throughout our lives. It may be good if God comes to us as a Father, but sometimes God must come as a friend and other times as a lover. Yet as we continue on our spiritual journeys, I promise that sometimes God will reveal himself in feminine form: himself as herself. (Perhaps it will be through Sophia infusing us with wisdom, or Mary loving us as she loved her son Jesus.) For some of us, this may be the first time that we fall in love with God. I know many such people myself.
We have to break through our ideas about God to find out who God really is. Our early and spontaneous images of God are typically a mixture of our experiences with our own mothers and fathers. If our mother was harshly critical, so is our God. If our father was domineering or authoritative, likewise our God. It’s almost tragic to witness how many people are afraid of God, experience God as cold and absent, and even have a sense of God as someone who might hurt and betray them. These ideas about God reveal far more about the state of our parent symbols than they do about our Trinitarian God.
Many of us, consciously or unconsciously, have pictured God and reality as a pyramid-shaped universe. We placed a male God at the top of the triangle and everything else beneath. Most Christian art, church design, and architecture reflects this pyramidal worldview. Humanity’s capacity to disguise its own flaws, even through religion, seems endless. Pyramid or patriarchal logic is only “logical” when applied in favor of the system and the status quo—which it proudly calls the “real world.” Our very inability to recognize that shows how little influence the dynamic Trinity had on our historical ways of thinking. Trinitarian thinking is more spiral, circle, and flow than pyramid.
We truly have nothing to be afraid of. The Trinitarian flow of God’s love is like the rise and fall of tides on a shore. In a Trinitarian Universe, reality can be pictured as an Infinite, Loving Outpouring that empowers and generates an Eternal, Loving Infolding. This eternal flow outward is echoed in history by every animal, fish, flower, bird, and planet you have ever seen. It is the universe: the first incarnation of God.
All we have to lose are the false images of God that do not serve us and are too small.
The foundational good news is that all of creation and all of humanity have been drawn into this loving flow (no exceptions)! We are not outsiders or spectators but inherently part of the divine dance. Such good theology was supposed to create good politics and history. We still have hope.
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