333 - Trinitarian Thoughts on Descending into the Grand Canyon

Trinitarian Thoughts on Descending into the Grand Canyon
By W. Paul Jones

"The Grand Canyon is ... a cauldron of death, symbol of creation's bloody chalice. Its restless sides teem with life, propelled by an insatiable drive to endure, indeed, to prevail. Wind, river, clutching root-fingers of trees, lean varmints in crouched determination -all are sister-brothers in the surging restlessness.... [H]ere one can sense strangely that consciousness is not alien, but a breakthrough -within and for the whole. Ironically, while such emergence brings the alienating burden of knowing what nothing else in creation seems yet to know, it opens the religious threshold: greeting self-consciousness as the emergence of the whole."

"In the face of such beauty, silence is the most appropriate response."
--Anonymous descender, 1909

"As beautiful as the rim is, one must hike down into the inner canyon to be grasped by the spirit and mystery of this place."
--Park Overlook Sign

Hiking from the south rim of the Grand Canyon to the Colorado River floor is, physically, no major challenge. The most dangerous part is not slipping after an incontinent mule team passes. Many hike it, although those who do the fourteen mile round trip Kaibob Trail in one day may be a more select group. And among these, fewer still attempt the marathon as a spiritual pilgrimage.

My longing to do so began several years earlier when, in a Navajo healing ceremony, I encountered the "Sipapu." This small hole in the hogan's dirt floor is a ceremonial focus for the power of the mysterious womb hole from which all spirits are birthed. The real "divine center" is known only to the gods, but many believe it to be the Grand Canyon. Into that huge hole I hiked, the one from which all of us may have

W. Paul Jones, Professor of Philosophical Theology at Saint Paul School of Theology in Kansas City, has appeared before in the pages of THEOLOGY TODAY and in other theological journals, such as Religion in Life, the Christian Century, and Quarterly Review. He is the author of several books, including Theological Worlds: Understanding the Alternative Rhythms of Christian Belief (1989) and Trumpet at Full Moon: An Introduction to Christian Spirituality as Diverse Practice (1992).

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come -dust to dust, life to life -on a pilgrimage from sunrise to sunset.

I

The first half mile was a welcomed contrast to the resort-like atmosphere of the rim. My eyes, at first, were those of the artist. My imagination fashioned a necklace from the maze of switchbacks, stringing together the mellow colors of carefree buttes and pinnacles and palisades. In time, I became more contemplative, emptied of thought, merging and floating with the birds, now at eye level. Other persons must have been so affected, for the map identified a point immediately in front as Buddha Peak, the one to the right as Vishnu Temple. Some time after the third hour, the pilgrimage became decidedly physical and, simultaneously, more spiritual. Thirst was my first clue that I did not belong here. Toads, lizards, a coiled rattlesnake -they all seemed at home -even a vulture overhead, circling with growing interest my slowing steps. A sign put the matter graphically: "Danger! Those without a gallon of water each, turn back now!" Life was as thin as a canteen strap.

With heavy panting, I seemed to be entering the electronic museum display on the rim. It had a beeper that went off every second for three minutes. The total beeps marked the advent of the canyon within the whole span of time. As I hiked, one fact became increasingly heavy: only with the last beep did the human species appear. In fact, human history is so minuscule that this last beep included not only "us" but all the extinct mammoth animals of prehistory.

To understand what was happening to me, one must understand that I am a theologian, philosophical by training, biblical by choice. History has long been my foundation for theological exploration. But with human figures still visible on the rim, I had quickly walked far beyond the symbolic equivalent of recorded history. And yet, stretching far below me, winding for miles down into the canyon, strata after strata, stretched endless symbolic layers of non-human time. Billions of years without us. Each of my downward steps was like going back in time a hundred years, as each mile-sign translated beeps into alienation.

It was close to 10 A.M. when I was swept by a childlike thought: Where was God all this time? Intellectually, this was no new question. But the artistic eyes with which I began, displaced by eyes more contemplative, were now very physical eyes, cutting straight through the romanticism of my theological metaphors. I had to get down and back out by sunset. With night temperatures well below freezing, and my water half gone, conclusions were simple. Lost in this symbolic immensity of time, I as a conscious being was a freak. We simply do not belong.

I picked up a pebble at my feet. The time it reflected, compared with the time in which self-conscious life has been on earth, staggers the

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mind. In a universe twenty billion years old, the first dated year in history is 4241 B.C.E. How utterly insignificant to this bleak wholeness is the fact of self-conscious mind. Standing deep within the canyon, feeling like a humorless afterthought of a mindless whole, my operating assumption as a theologian became a strange non sequitur. How can one any longer take this recent phenomenon of self-consciousness as the image for understanding the meaning of the whole? From that point on the trail, I knew myself to be a misfit, for I alone was self-conscious. Impossible to shake was a portrait of the newest kid on the cosmic block, arrogantly insisting that behind everything was one of his kind.

Violating all techniques of suspenseful story telling, let me just say straight out that I made it down and back in one day. But the price was costly. Merton claimed that in the desert the wrestling with God is until one receives a new name. In the canyon that day, I knew that my wrestling would be until God, too, was renamed. The irreversibility of this awareness became clear the next day. I drove to Mount Palomar. The conclusion became indelible. Whether I looked into the earth or away from it, the effect was the same. Through that telescope one can see a billion light years away, which is staggering when one remembers that a light year itself is six trillion miles. And while our solar system is seven billion miles in diameter, from outer space it is simply one star in a gigantic galaxy -which itself appears as only a minor smudge within at least 100 million observable galaxies much like our own.

What the Grand Canyon does for time, Palomar does for space. With the arrival of consciousness late on a freak-like speck in an inconceivable vastness, how can one any longer propose self-consciousness as the defining analogy for comprehending the totality? As Freud observed, "I personally have a vast respect for mind, but has nature? Mind is only a little bit of nature, the rest of which seems to be able to get along very well without it."¹

Existence is the search for the analogy by which to be ordered. A generation ago, Dorothy Emmet concluded that the future of metaphysics (and thus theology) depended upon the emergence of a new analogy capable of igniting the imagination.² She recognized, apparently, what is becoming clearer now, that we have crossed a threshold in which deity as self-conscious being can no longer be entertained as anteceding the cosmos. Whatever validity Christianity may claim, it must be in the full face of our cosmic loneliness and the absurd abyss of prior aloneness for any professed deity.

The Canyon, however, focused a second childlike question. If we persist in projecting a self-conscious God as creator-designer of the whole, the question of God's doing becomes even more devastating

¹ Sigmund Freud, Psychoanalysis and Faith (New York: Basic Books 1963), pp. 133-134.
² Dorothy Emmet, The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking (London: Macmillan and Company, 1945).

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than God's absence. It was noon when I reached the bottom. Beside the surging Colorado River, I ate a sandwich, watching the pink and orange swirl of clouds stir the canyon into a cauldron of peach froth, when a motion far closer refocused my eyes. I had been watching the sky through a spider web and in the center was a healthy-sized spider, riding the breeze patiently, oblivious to the peach display. A fly struck the web. With three venomous assaults on the terrorized insect, the spider began sucking it apart, savoring lunch with contentment. How can I stomach a God who designed such an arrangement, especially when, sooner or later, each of us will experience the whole from the vantage point of the fly? The spider may think such an arrangement to be fine, but only until a bird sees its lunch being a spider in the middle of that web. In collecting firewood the previous day, I saw, under a log, what as a child we called "roly-polies." I wondered if they hurt anything. At the canyon bottom, I knew the absurdity of such a question. There is nothing alive that is not bad news for something. The only image of God that could any longer be viable would be one that permitted me to stare baldfaced at both fly and spider.

Ernest Becker's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death, is deadly to any God who would dare peer out from behind the death and decay woven irradicably into the fabric of "creation." Staring unblinkingly into the repulsive extravagance in time and blood that has brought evolution to where we are, Becker asks, "What are we to make of a creation in which the routine activity is for organisms to be tearing others apart ... , everyone reaching out to incorporate others who are edible to him?" God cannot be guiltless, whether as the informing "wisdom" of nature's bloody plan or, conceived more distantly, as the force functioning intrusively as "acts of God," specializing in earthquakes and plagues, either willed or permitted. Every attempt at theodicy founders, for any self-conscious Deity must be brought to confession by the portrait of a "nightmare spectacular taking place on a planet soaked for hundreds of millions of years in the blood of all its creatures," turning the planet "into a vast pit of fertilizer."³ A fully conscious creator forces the enigma that confounds every theodicy: the inconceivability of affirming a loving will as having designed a creation in which it is the routine activity of every organism to devour something else for its livelihood. Either we have for this "terror of creation" a sadomasochistic Designer or an Impotent Watcher or else we must forfeit primal self-consciousness as our informing image. Teresa of Avila was enough of a mystic to put it charitably, "I do not wonder, God, that you have so few friends from the way you treat them."

Pascal was right in insisting that a religion that does not believe that God is hidden is not true. Yet it is equally true that the erosion of all images for God amounts to functional atheism. Process theology is one effort reflecting a decided direction in current theology. In the absence

³ Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: The Free Press, 1973), pp. 282-285.

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of discernible continuity within history, meaning is conceived as continuity within God, replacing "being" with "becoming" as an ultimate category.⁴ Evoked by this shift, related images can suggest space as the consciousness of God, matter the visibility of God's psychic energy, time the divine dynamic, heaven the imagination of God, hell the divine forgetting, and "kingdom" the product of God's active memory.⁵

Thus John Cobb interprets Christian theology without a cosmologically antecedent deity. Rather, God is organic with the cosmos, much as mind is to body, luring forth the novel possibilities of each instant and refining the redeemable into continuity through the divine memory.⁶ This gentle, but sad, Whiteheadean God, however, remains nostalgically alone. No matter how many mementos of beauty are remembered, they remain that which once was, fondly remembered now. Thus, the images operative in Christian theology tend to offer too much or too little -either a transcendent, all-knowing God, bordering on sadism, or a God immanent within the organic process, bordering on impotence.

Chesterton seems right. Deeply within "we have to feel the universe at once as an ogre's castle, to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage, to which we can return at evening."⁷ Applied to the process God, one can pity but not rail against a God who is doing the best possible in a limited situation for which there is no divine responsibility. As a result, the highs and the lows are leveled, diluted into a quietly reasonable and aesthetic order, kindly focused as divine invitations to choose well from divinely weighted choices. The responsibility is ours, reaping from our short time what we sow, or are sown. The price is a sacrifice of the full mystery, the terror, the grotesque, the hemorrhaging and blatancy of evil, as a surd worthy of rage. While drinking deeply of sadness, such process imagery cannot keep hidden the God who dabs with blood, using a brush of human hair. For the Christian realist, the cross remains the daily bottom line on history's balance sheet, inscribed in red.

The convergence of four ideas creates a promising alternative. Rosemary Ruether introduces time into the definition of God: "I am who I will be."⁸ Carol Ochs proposes God as the place of the world.⁹

⁴ Philosophically, the impetus was evident in Charles Hartshorne, The Divine Relativity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948); theologically, the first significant notice was John B. Cobb, Jr., A Christian Natural Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1965).
⁵ E.g., Marjorie Suchocki, God, Church, World (New York: Crossroads Press, 1982) and The End of Evil: Process Eschatology in Historical Context (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988); Eugene Peters, The Creative Advance (St. Louis: Bethany, 1966); David R. Griffin, A Process Christology (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1973).
⁶ John B. Cobb, Jr., Process Theology as Political Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1982) and with David Ray Griffin, Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976).
⁷ G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1950), p. 130.
⁸ Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (Boston: Beacon, 1983).
⁹ Carol Ochs, Behind the Sex of God (Boston: Beacon, 1977).

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Nicolas Berdyaev develops Eckhart's and Boehme's mystic metaphors into "becoming" as a theogonic process, birthing the Trinity from the Divine Nothing.¹⁰ And Nikos Kazantzakis portrays God's direct involvement in the bloody conflict of creation as a carnal call to transubstantiate matter into divine ecstasy, for the divine-human heart is "the earthen threshing-floor where night and day the defender of the borders fights with death."¹¹ These images help shift the primal analogy from the what of self-consciousness to the how of its emergence. The movement becomes immanence toward transcendence, through the dynamic intersection of panentheism (the world in God) and what I choose to call panintratheism (God through the world).

The Grand Canyon is indeed a cauldron of death, symbol of creation's bloody chalice. Its restless sides teem with life, propelled by an insatiable drive to endure, indeed, to prevail. Wind, river, clutching root-fingers of trees, lean varmints in crouched determination -all are sister-brothers in the surging restlessness. We can feel this straining deeply within ourselves. Life is thrashing about, expanding, reaching out, in uncertain directions for seemingly unknown reasons. But here one can sense strangely that consciousness is not alien, but a breakthrough-within and for the whole. Ironically, while such emergence brings the alienating burden of knowing what nothing else in creation seems yet to know, it opens the religious threshold: greeting self-consciousness as the emergence of the whole.

Existence is polarized between the drive to be separated from and the passion to lose oneself in. As if we were characters in search of an author, in "knowing" we crave to be "known." At the same time, we ache for a wholeness in which the names of the dancers no longer matter. Even Christian mystics, who were tempted to forfeit the carnal struggle, still image the birth of God in the self as paralleling God's fleshly becoming as the center point of history.¹² The primal drive to be fruitful and multiply impulses the evolutionary travail beyond survival, toward participation in that which is no longer possible within a death-wrapped finitude. Thus, self-consciousness, evoking both terror over death and awe as the heart of worship, discloses each microcosm as the autobiography of God.

II

Contemporary theologians have largely abandoned the temporal image of a completed creation from which humans fell, as well as a once-ideal humanity that has since lost its wholeness. It is time to draw the corollary by abandoning the image of a complete God, from whom the cosmos alienated itself through disobedience. The traditional understandings moved from wholeness to less, searching for a reason

¹⁰ Nicolas Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1948), pp. 29f.
¹¹ Nikos Kazantzakis, The Saviors of God (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), p. 151 et passim.
¹² E.g., Origen, St. Gregory of Nyssa, Evagrius of Pontus, Richard of St. Victor, Julian of Norwich, and St. Teresa of Avila.

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why. The answer we propose begins with less, searching for more, and for good reason. This understanding evokes the image of a reverse Trinity. The traditional understanding of Trinity begins with the Father as a self-conscious, willing, all powerful, all knowing creator and designer of the whole. God restructures the world into its "fallen" condition as punishment for Adam's sin. The Father consequently sends his Son into the world, bridging through suffering the alienating distance manifested as death. Finally, God as Spirit, proceeding from the Father (and the Son?), is given as a gift to those who believe. An official prayer for Trinity Sunday discloses the degree to which the Trinity is conceived sequentially and hierarchically, fully dependent upon the eternally self-conscious Father: "Father, you sent your Word to bring us truth and your Spirit to make us holy."¹³

A reversed Trinity begins with the Spirit moving from darkness out over the face of the deep, wrestling with all that is lacking form and void (Genesis 1:1-5). This sacred restlessness intertwines nature and history in a common pilgrimage. Calling the Spirit Holy identifies this surging whole as self-consciousness-in-the-making. Brooding over the face of the chaos is the Spirit who, through carnal incarnation in and through and with the length and breadth and depth of all creation, is becoming the fully conscious God as All in All. Everything is passing through incarnate time into the eternity of the divine interiority." God-as-becoming," preconscious in the explosive power and riotous expansiveness of the primal cosmos, is emerging in our self-consciousness as God gazing back over the long struggle in recognition. The rhythm of the whole, then, is life coming from, impulsed by, and returning as enrichment into the flesh and blood of the emerging divine self-consciousness." Father, as fully self-consious Being, is not the beginning, but the end, as the eternal culmination of the Spirit's contending. The reversed Trinity, replacing the terminus a quo with the terminus ad quem, so links the two that theodicy is resolved in theogony.

The new heaven and the new earth begin as hunger, bud as promise, and consummate in God's flowering as mutual self-consciousness. Thus the desert experience, so central in Christian spirituality, is, in truth, participation in the birth pangs of God as the Spirit through the Son midwifes the cosmos through "groaning in travail." This organic reinterpretation of the social Trinity¹⁴ entails something of the grandeur sensed by Teilhard de Chardin in the cosmic sweep toward an "Omega Point."¹⁵ But it is rendered full drama rather than

¹³ Opening prayer for Trinity Sunday, The Sacramentary (New York: Catholic Book Publishing Co., 1974), p. 346.
¹⁴ E.g., Leonard Hodgson, The Doctrine of the Trinity (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1944); Charles Lowry, The Trinity and Christian Devotion (New York: Harper, 1946); C. C. J. Webb, God and Personality (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1918); Lionel Thornton, The Incarnate Lord (London: Longmans, Green, 1928).
¹⁵ Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man (New York: Harper and Row, 1964); The Phenomenon of Man (New York: Harper, 1959).

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shadow-show, for the Alpha as Spirit is not the "Father" who foreknowingly navigates the whole to its predetermined harbor. Our understanding is closer to Kazantzakis' God, bloody and panting, struggling for consciousness and thus for sanity.

III

The reverse Trinity does not clearly result from scriptural exegesis. Neither does the traditional trinitarian understanding. The church's ongoing task is to discern analogies powerful enough in its experience to magnetize scriptural imagery into a revealing whole. Death of the poet is the strangulation of God. With the reverse Trinity as an analog, the scriptural God is discerned as the Spirit "crying out in every spirit," making intercessions through all of creation "with sighs too deep for words." Prayer is that "inward groaning" in which each speck of life longs in hope to be "set free from bondage to decay," rendering "the present suffering not worth comparing with the glory to be." This becoming of God is most clear in the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the stranger, and the prisoner, for through "the least of these" is it being "done unto me." Thus "the deepness of our hearts" within and "the mind of the Spirit" without are creation's dynamic, each searching out the other.

Evidence that "the Spirit of God really dwells in you" comes in one's heart crying out the recognition, "Abba! Father!" Herein is revealed the "plan for the fullness of time to unite all things in [God], things in heaven and things on earth," so that no speck of life is any longer sojourner or stranger but adopted into the cosmic household. Of such a God, one best sings -music by Mahler, words by St. Paul -of the One "above all and through all and in all," whose descent as ascent is the emergence through which God is "filling all things."

Expressed christologically, God is birthed as the lowly one, unrecognized during the hidden years, crushed and bloody as divine-human crucifixion, resurrected as the intoxicating hope of Ascension as Pentecost. The tree of Eden's temptation, planted deeply at history's tragic center, becomes "the tree of life" whose "leaves are for the healing of the nations," for its trunk is resurrection as the divine emergence. Faith means living this vision "as if," resolving theodicy as foretaste. Looking back over our long emergence from the perspective of God's promised future in which there shall be no "mourning nor crying nor pain any more," one is finally able to say of the whole that "there shall no more be anything accursed."

This vision is fed by the Eucharist as aperitif-the chalice of shed blood hoisted, blessed, and returned as "the water of life without price," from which "none shall thirst again." Fermented grapes and kneaded bread are the systole and diastole of creation's pulsing, moving toward the Eucharistic great amen: "Through him, with him, in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all glory and honor is yours, Almighty Father, for ever and ever. Amen!" The offertory is cosmic,

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dropping the crumbs of our being and our doing into the chalice of our hopes, lifted into God as transubstantiation. St. Francis, who saw Christ incarnate in lepers and could address sun and moon as brother and sister, found in the Eucharist the clue to God's infinite disguises.

This understanding we are proposing takes Hebrew Scripture seriously, rejecting the tendency of current theologians to pick and choose, dismissing its "difficult" sections as "primitive" thinking. Israel's antiquity, as the honest travail of human consciousness in its emergence, reflects as well the pilgrimage of the divine consciousness. Dare we take seriously Yahweh's offensive extravagances, flaying with those wild ranges of feelings that the Psalmists suspected were as divine as they were human? Is it faithful to filter God into a shallow and tepid "goodness," assigning wholesale the tremors of evil to humans or to a hypothetical Satan? Rather, the dynamic as divine-human is as internal as it is external, the potency of nothingness for both creativity and negation.¹⁶ Throughout is the God of plunging madness, jealously on the frantic edge of loneliness, passionately sacrificial in the emergence as agape, disclosing the drive and passion of consciousness for its sabbatical joy. In Jesus as the Christ, Spirit beholds spirit, Word marvels over word in an intersection of incredible recognition-of naming and being named-the God for us and the human for God.

Whitehead's description of the transition from God as void through God as enemy to God as companion may be more than the evolution of human consciousness. It may suggest as well the map of a wayfaring stranger, who through the myriad yearnings and clutchings and reachings and conflictings and communions and imaginings and forgettings and rememberings lays claim now to a proper name. Even G. K. Chesterton, custodian of orthodoxy, insisted on the Christian God as incomplete, rebellious, courageous to the breaking point, who went through agony, doubt, divine forsakenness and, indeed, at points, was an atheist.¹⁷

The interaction of nature and spirit as consciousness finds its most powerful imagery, perhaps, in sexuality. While its expressions are sometimes ruthless in their drivenness, it can become a sacrament without parallel, capturing for St. Paul the relationship of Christ and the church. Creation is an androgynous love affair of Spirit with the Lamb (Revelation 22:17), consummated as the marriage feast celebrating the emerging God as All in All. Sexuality, spanning foreplay to afterbirth, wraps richly this divine analogy-writhing, gentle, wrenching, joyous, desperate, ecstatic, embracing, frightening, exciting, lonely, clutching, laughing, bloody, teasing, agonizing, frantic, unrepeatable. Understandably, Becker insisted that God is the only adequate sex partner.

¹⁶ The distinction between "to ouk" (nothingness) and "to meon" (non-being) is useful in indicating the two contrary dimensions involved here.
¹⁷ G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, pp. 138-9.

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Little wonder that Christianity has been obsessed with sexuality, for this interplay of sexual joy and childbirth pain as analogy for the whole, can either rub harshly or massage gently the conundrum of existence. Sexuality can emerge with terrifying violence, and yet have its base, as Bloesch insists, in the yearnings of the soul for God.¹⁸ This may be why Christians keep stumbling over birth control and abortion. Down deep, they evoke a strange feeling of domesticating the wild Spirit.

Our struggle with theodicy centered in an experience, in the Grand Canyon. The resolution we are proposing is likewise the explication of an experience, in my hermitage. My journal records it this way:

I have had the God-experience for which I have long yearned. I now know. To experience God means to smell the flames of the fireplace behind me, to see the sun straining to break the haze haloing the cedars in front, and to hear the straining and zinging and cracking of the frozen lake. Everything has the expectancy of a still life, waiting the red dash of a cardinal's arrival. I turned on Victoria's "O Magnum Mysterium." The ache of soul and the yearning of things all around me are finding a friend in each other. I am breathless with knowing. This is no longer an absent Landlord with whom I am dealing-One who, before leaving, structured a world with mindless clumsiness. God is the Spirit pulsating within, incarnated without. Everywhere this dawn, I see and hear the body of God's writhing and ecstasy. God pulses in my mind and loins-even in my knees, aching to trudge the snow, to roll and frolic and burrow.

Yet I dare not blink away the realism. It is deathly cold outside, fifteen below zero, with a wind that sears the flesh. Animals have begun their daily death-hunt for the careless and unfortunate. Yet it feels different now. There is no puzzle behind the mystery, for the mystery itself is sufficient. All is here in front of me-and in me-as liturgical dance.

I am released from a life-long guessing game, freed to experience the divine recognition-in a child's giggle, a soaring hawk, the pleading of eyes-and, can I say it?, in the screaming terror of a rabbit, crunched into unconsciousness by a hungry coyote. Can such a God be conscious? Yes, at the edge of becoming-sometimes barely, other times brilliantly, slightly ahead of each threshold. Is God present? Everywhere, enormous in breadth, expansive in depth, and beyond us all in imagination and memory. God is the emerging consciousness which darts in and out, through and for, behind and in front, encountered as Self-consciousness in revelatory moments. God is the place of the world, history the continuo of God's time-and faith a wagering on God's determination to emerge, and to outlast.

Was it Merton who likened humankind to Jacob, wrestling with a gutsy God for a blessing, on the way home to an estranged twin?

Theodicy is of little consequence unless lived. Thus the spirituality of the reverse Trinity centers in the Triune God as source, companion, and goal. As creative source, God the Spirit is the grounding and hungry abyss of being-as midwife and Mother. As incarnate companion, God the Son/Daughter is the relationality and mutuality of being-as wedded lover and friend. And as self-conscious goal, God the Father/Queen is the ecstatic fullness of being-coming, coming,

¹⁸ Donald Bloesch, The Struggle of Prayer (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980).

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ever coming. As lived, this means responding to God as the inner and outer edge of everything, yearning from the inside out, and the outside in, at one's fingertips, where breath touches lungs, where smell connects flower and soul, as God's birthing into recognition. Religious experience, then, ranges from the mystic's homesickness, through the intimacy and contending of new lovers and old friends, to the communion and consummation whose name is Love.

IV

I remember as a boy sitting one night with my dog, staring at the stars. The dog refused to look. I focused his eyes by directing his nose. Every effort failed. When finally I realized that the stars could not exist for him, a shadow fell between us. Self-consciousness renders us lonely aliens in the Grand Canyon of our world, as well as terrorizes us in awareness of the violence birthing our emergence. Reconciliation is impossible if self-consciousness is the imago Dei by which to conceive God as preceding the whole as its designer. Reconciliation is possible, however, if the imago Dei is identified as the emergence of self-consciousness. Consciousness, then, is the surging, inchoate interiority of all things, emerging as a transcendence who greets our aloneness as friend and ally. The metaphysical binding of divine and human is the ache and passion for wholeness, pleading for recognition in Otherness. And faith? It is a commitment to see the world with an analogy so illuminating that in choosing it, the experience is one of having been chosen.