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).