Trinity Sunday Reflection

by CNS · May 28, 2021

The Dance of Creation

Jesus the Christ, true God, and true Man is the paradigm and the blueprint of creation, the matrix of our existence also.

In Christ, Matter is not on its own, nor is humanity on one side and God on the other; none of these intrinsically united dimensions surpass the others so that it does not make sense to affirm that Christ is more divine than human or more worldly than heavenly… The veil of separation has been torn, and the integration of reality begins with the redemption of man (Culto y secularización. Apuntes para una antropología litúrgica, Madrid 1979).

In the Franciscan intellectual tradition of St Bonaventure and Blessed John Duns Scotus, this understanding already started blossoming. Once we have experienced this dynamic imprint of God, we will see it everywhere in creation. The more our perspective is elevated, the more we can experience the integrated vision of the seamless fabric of the entire reality… the undivided consciousness of the totality.

A tradition dies when it stops growing. When it cannot expand to embrace new vistas, it should be discarded. We must find how our religion and science can dance together if we want a living spirituality.

There are not three separate realities: God, Man, and the World; but neither is there one, whether God, Man or World. Reality is “cosmotheandric”. It is our way of looking that makes reality appear to us at times under one aspect, at times under another; continually unfolding to new horizons. God, Humanity, and World are in an intimate and constitutive collaboration to construct Reality, to make history advance, to continue the dance of creation.

Just as the full humanity of Jesus was brought into unity with the Word, we also are called to bring our very self, our community, and the entire world into unity with the Trinitarian reality out of which everything arises.

This does not require any additional ideology to impose on reality. To overcome our perspective which is narrowed down and fragmented, we need but to open and to hold a space of silence that overcomes our programming and touches our collective awareness to the transcendent reality. This is how we participate in the dynamic life of the Trinity.

This is at the core of our Franciscan spiritual life. The soul begins its journey recognising its end, which is the contemplation of the highest good above. In the penultimate chapter the soul is contemplating the “most Blessed Trinity in its Name which is Good.” The arrival at the contemplation of the Trinity of persons follows the journey of the soul contemplating God as the highest being to then contemplating God as the highest good.

Living out of this contemplative dimension of recaptured innocence frees us from the longing for perfection, the longing to be better than the next, to open ourselves to this triple dimension of reality, open to others, to the world, and God. Our life centred on the goal of achieving harmonious communion with them all.

All our great pride, our independence, our striving for dominance, all, yes all have been brought to their knees by the smallest assembly of proteins, nucleic acids, leopards, and carbohydrates; a tiny virus that seeks its survival in that grey area between living and non-living being.

As the human race, we are slowly coming to perceive our connectivity that has been proclaimed by the mystics throughout the ages. This is our new horizon calling us through contemplation to a new and gentler way of living our lives in that dynamic dance of interconnectivity, the ongoing dance of creation.