Their agenda for justice was the most foundational and undercutting of all others: a very simple lifestyle outside the system of production and consumption (the real meaning of the vow of poverty), plus a conscious identification with the marginalized of society (the communion of saints pushed to its outer edge).
.. By “living on the edge of the inside” I mean building on the solid Tradition (“from the inside”) from a new and creative stance where you cannot be co-opted for purposes of security, possessions, or the illusions of power (“on the edge”). Francis and Clare placed themselves outside the social and ecclesiastical system. Francis was not a priest, nor were Franciscan men to pursue priesthood in the early years of the order. Theirs was not a spirituality of earning or seeking worthiness, career, church status, moral one-upmanship, or divine favor (which they knew they already had).
.. Whoever is paying our bills and giving us security and status determines what we can and cannot say or even think.
.. When Jesus and John’s Gospel used the term “the world,” they did not mean the earth, creation, or civilization, which Jesus clearly came to love and save (see John 12:47). They were referring to idolatrous systems and institutions that are invariably self-referential and “always passing away” (see 1 Corinthians 7:31).
Participatory Knowing
In other words, God (and uniquely the Trinity) cannot be known as we know any other object—such as a machine, an objective idea, or a tree—which we are able to “objectify.” We look at objects, and we judge them from a distance through our normal intelligence, parsing out their varying parts, separating this from that, presuming that to understand the parts is to understand the whole. Our dualistic approach is really more taxonomy than true knowing of a thing in its wholeness.
God can never be objectified in this way, but can only be “subjectified” by becoming one with the Source! When neither you nor the other is treated as a mere object, but both rest in an I-Thou of mutual admiration, you have spiritual knowing. [2] Some of us call this nondual consciousness or contemplative knowing.
God Is Relationship
Aristotle taught that there were ten different qualities to all things. I’m not going to list all ten of them; two will suffice. He said there was “substance” and there was “relationship.”
.. We wanted a substantial God whom we could prove was as good as anybody else’s God!
Yet, when Jesus called himself the Son of the Father and yet one with the Father, he is giving clear primacy torelationship.
.. I would name salvation as simply the readiness, the capacity, and the willingness to stay in relationship. As long as you show up with some degree of vulnerability, the Spirit can keep working.
.. That’s why Jesus shows up in this world as a naked, vulnerable one—a defenseless baby. Talk about utter relationship! Naked vulnerability means I’m going to let you influence me; I’m going to allow you to change me.
.. We are intrinsically like the Trinity, living in an absolute relatedness. To stand outside of this flow is to live within the deepest meaning of sin.
From Disconnection to Connection
I’m convinced that beneath the ugly manifestations of our present evils—political corruption, ecological devastation, warring against one another everywhere, hating each other based on race, gender, religion, or sexual orientation—the greatest dis-ease facing humanity right now is our profound and painful sense ofdisconnection. We feel disconnected from God, certainly, but also from ourselves (our bodies), from each other, and from our world.
.. Trinity represents the overcoming of the foundational philosophical problem called “the One and the Many.” How things are both utterly connected and yet distinct is invariably the question of the serious seeker.
.. With the endless diversity in creation, it is clear that God is notobsessed with uniformity. God does not desire uniformity, but unity.
.. Trinity is all about relationship and connection. We know the Trinity through experiencing the flow itself, which dissolves our sense of disconnection.
.. Trinity was made to order to undercut all dualistic thinking. Yet Christianity shelved the idea for all practical purposes, because our dualistic theologies could not process it. [1]
.. God is not a being among other beings, but rather the Ground of Being itselfwhich then flows through all beings. As Paul says to the intellectuals in Athens, this God “is not far from us, but is the one in whom we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:27-28).