Over this last week I've been reflecting upon Cynthia Bourgeault's notion of the Law of Three (or the ternary workings of the universe). In particular I've been pondering those times in my life where I have felt the most alive and "connected" to that Great Source of Being.
It turns out that at least two things have been present (and I'm looking for a third): a sense of creativity, and a sense of play. The more I sit in reflection about this, the more I'm becoming convinced that the/a third element is the physical body connection. For the Hebrew Bible/Old Treatment Tradition, the body was a good thing; this wasn't the case for the Platonic Ideals (in which all bodies fell short of the Ideal Body).
What has continued to sit with me are some of the following images: "A ternary system [being] asymmetrical and innovative ... corkscrews its way through time, matter, form—whatever plane is at hand—in a riot of uncertainty and new combinations, the whole of which is the fullness of divine reality";* "For the late theologian Beatrice Bruteau (1930-2014), the Trinity is first and foremost an image of relational unity. The three “God-persons in community,” as she sees it, comprise the prototype and the prerequisite for the expression of agape love—the energy of the Godhead itself. Bruteau builds a detailed case for why threefoldness is the necessary condition for agape love. She goes on to demonstrate why threefoldness is by nature “ecstatic” or, in other words, self-giving and generative. By its very threefoldness, it “breaks symmetry” (a term borrowed from quantum mechanics) and projects the agape love outward, calling new forms of being into existence, each of which bears the imprint of the original symbiotic unity that created it. “It is the presence of the Trinity as a pattern repeated at every scale of the cosmic order,” she believes, “that makes the universe a manifestation of God and itself sacred and holy.”** and "Understood within the context of a universe in motion, and with the Law of Three as its template, the Trinity becomes a dynamic mandala of God’s ongoing creativity in an evolving universe. It becomes, in fact, the evolutionary principle. The Trinity as a symbol of relationship invites us to trust the relationality of nature itself and to reconsider what we understand about the very nature of love. It is no longer a pre-existent “property” of God, but an emergent property of the whole of creation, joined in that divine dance."***
Where and when do you going yourself fully "connected"?
Blessed be,
Joel
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*Adapted from Cynthia Bourgeault, The Shape of God: Deepening the Mystery of the Trinity, disc 2 (CAC: 2004), CD, DVD, MP3 download; and
The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three (Shambhala Publications, Inc.: 2013), 6, 64-65, 81. (See Richard Rohr's Mediation for 3/15/2017).
**Beatrice Bruteau, God’s Ecstasy: The Creation of a Self-Creating World (New York: Crossroad, 1997), 14. (See Richard Rohr's Mediation for 3/14/2017).
***Adapted from Cynthia Bourgeault, “Trinity: The Evolutionary Principle of Unfolding Creativity,” The Mendicant, Vol. 7 No. 1 (CAC: 2017), 1, 5. (See Richard Rohr's Mediation for 3/14/2017).
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