Trinity

Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty,
Early in the morning Our song shall rise to Thee.
Holy, holy, holy! Merciful and mighty,
God in three persons. Blessed Trinity!
Holy, holy, holy! Though the darkness hide thee.
Though the eye of sinful man Thy glory may not see.
Only Thou art holy. There is none beside Thee.
Perfect in power, in love and purity.
– Reginald Heber (1783-1826), from “Holy, Holy, Holy” (1826)

Another week, another frame-verse battle. But at least this one makes reasonable sense. For our post this week, I had intended to build upon our mental experiment from last week by exploring how the peaceful society that the Jesus movement fosters in people might evolve into bringing the kingdom of God on earth. Thomas, however, had another blog thought, so whenever I tried to copy my chosen frame-verse, he made my computer malfunction. My spirit guide has become remarkably good at messing with electronics, for someone who last lived on earth in the nineteenth century. The frame-verse that he had chosen, I didn’t want because it talked about the Trinity. He told me then that it was past time for me to accept the fact that God is a Trinity. I retorted that I will go there as soon as he can show me how Jesus can be simultaneously available to eight billion people at once, while at the same time He is conversing with us and feeding His pet fish.

I snapped, “Explain that, if you can!”

Thomas said drily, “He does it the same way God can do it. You are forgetting that Jesus is God, little one, while you are stuck inside your little pea-brain head!”

“And you are forgetting that you are a male, and males fight dirty,” was what I retorted to him.

And that was the way our week began. But I considered my question to be both legitimate and important. And I knew that you would want to hear his answer as much as I want to hear it. How is it possible that just one God and one Jesus are able to know and intimately relate to each of the eight billion of us individually at the level of our deepest hearts?

This question first occurred to me last summer, when Thomas and I were spending a lot of time with Jesus. My Thomas was chasing his Brother among the deer, devotedly helping Him to keep in human balance, while I was discussing with Jesus plans for His website that I was having trouble back then even envisioning. And meanwhile, all over this earth there were people who were praying to Jesus. And, what? They were getting a busy-signal? 

And what was all this sudden talk about a Trinity? I have long been telling Thomas that of course there is no such thing as a Trinity. God is Consciousness, and all that exists! Christianity has that doctrine wrong. If Thomas disagreed with me, he should have said so at the time. And if I have the Trinity idea wrong, then what else do I have wrong?

I hear from people now and again who want me to tell them how to establish a relationship with their spirit guide, like the relationship that I have with Thomas. What I really want to say to them is, “Damned if I know.” All I know is that at this point in my life, there is a male voice from behind my left shoulder that is full of authoritative and sometimes vaguely exasperated-sounding opinions. And there is on rare occasions a soft and sweet male voice from behind my head that I now recognize as Jesus. They never shout. I could ignore them. But I don’t.

(Developing the sort of relationship that Thomas and I have is a long and subtle process, and the results can be quite wonderful. We have written about that process here.)

I think the problem that my Thomas has is the same problem that you or I would be having, if our kid brother were a mega-star. Thomas is left forever with taking what are mere supporting roles. Like, for example, taking the role of being a spirit guide for some ditz because she writes books and does a website for his mega-star kid brother. Thomas probably doesn’t love doing this for me. The role of spirit guide is deeply parental, heavily love-based and with lots of day-to-day and even minute-by-minute attention-paying. And my Thomas has taken this role for Jesus and for me both at once, I now realize, since although Jesus doesn’t need a spirit guide, there now is literally no one else in existence who is freely willing to call Jesus “brat” and treat Him as if He is a mere human being in order to help Him maintain a human balance. So for my whole life, Thomas has been rushing back and forth between us. It is no wonder that he looks vaguely worried a lot of the time, and he often sounds exasperated. And I love him! So I have lately resolved to be less of a pain in the neck to him. Resolve, of course, is only a promise that you are doing your best to keep. And perhaps in return, on Tuesday during our middle-of-the-night work time, Thomas told me that God is a Trinity because God is actually manifold. Just as there is no time and no space, so God has no limit.

He paused. Then he said. “That makes no sense to you, right?”

“Right. But that’s okay. Now, please explain how Jesus can be answering fifty million prayers at once while we are chatting with Him and He is feeding His fish.”

“Same answer.”

“I was afraid you’d say that.”

All of this is going to make sense to us once we are back in our expanded minds and after we die away from here! There are so many things that make ultimate sense, and yet they don’t make sense right now, but on a deeper level and when we are back possessing all our faculties, they are going to make sense. And I can see that Thomas is trying now to have more empathy for me. I am his first outing as a spirit guide, after all. He is just a beginner at this. And I suspect that his new effort at having empathy for me is being made at Jesus’s suggestion.

The next morning Thomas said to me, “What bothers you about the Trinity is that it is a closed divine loop. It leaves people out.” 

“Precisely!” That was a mental blurt. I hadn’t realized until Thomas said it – also mentally – that my entire problem with the Trinity has been that it leaves us out altogether. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit makes God into a divine little clique. What good is that?

He said, “As you know, but as people back then didn’t know, the Father actually is the Holy Spirit. So, imagine that the third person of the Trinity is you. Does that make a difference to the way you see it?”

“It makes all the difference.” But then came my “Aha” moment. “You talked this over with Jesus, didn’t you?”

When Thomas said nothing, after a little time I said softly, “I love you, my dear one. It’s okay.” Then a little later I said, “Will you tell me how He solved my problem?”

“I asked Jesus what He thought. He said the Trinity was just a Roman idea. As you keep telling me. He told me to make people the third person. He knows you better than I do.”

Of course, that isn’t true. But Jesus does seem to understand people. That is what comes of loving people the way that Jesus loves people. And my favorite Christian blogger posted something interesting last week about the concept of human deification in the very early church. Perhaps even more to the point, the fact that each of us is inextricably part of the same Consciousness which includes the High God means that in a very real sense, every one of us is a part of the great circle-dance that is the genuine Trinity. And each of us is entitled to be there! Jesus’s insight is much more than the instinctive kindness that simply is Jesus. Rather, His insight is the necessary ending of the ugly Roman Christian power-play that long ago cut us off from God’s love and replaced God’s love with the fear of hell and damnation, on that long-ago day when Rome co-opted control of the love of God and of Jesus and replaced it all with the Roman Christian dogma of the Trinity.
  

Everyone’s favorite Catholic apologist, the wonderful Father Richard Rohr, has written extensively on the Trinity. I greatly admire Father Rohr for his graceful sow’s-ear-into-silk-purse skill with Roman ideas which are seventeen centuries old, and what he does with the Trinity almost makes it work. He says, “God for us, we call you Father. God alongside us, we call you Son. God within us, we call you Holy Spirit.” Of course, the reason why this still doesn’t work is that it makes the dogma important, and not the divine-plus-human truth. No amount of lovely playing with words can get us around that!

But, yes indeed, there is a Trinity after all. The genuine Trinity is a way for us to envision what is otherwise  inexpressible. It enables us to see in dramatic form the remarkable flow of consciousness energy that happens as you and I work to raise our personal spiritual vibrations to the Godhead level and above, all eight billion of us in an endless flow, while Jesus emphasizes to us His status as fully human and fully divine. And He incredibly maintains His fully human status, even though He is vibrating even higher now than the Godhead level. Jesus is our connection within Consciousness to God and to the endless flow of that energy, because from within all levels of Consciousness He can reach out now to each of us! And thereby, within the Trinity that includes God and Jesus and all of humanity, we can at last complete the entire circle-dance of love.

Jesus made a point when He was on earth of calling Himself the Son of Man. This term appears in the Old Testament for a man who has come from God as a fully human being. Which was always what I thought that Jesus meant His followers to see Him to be: He had come to us as the fulfillment of that prophesy. He was using the Old Testament term to explain to His followers that He was precisely that Man from God, made flesh. But I have lately read an article that suggests that  perhaps Jesus might have seen the term as meaning even something more. I am in touch with Jesus only through Thomas unless Thomas happens to take me to meet with Jesus, and Thomas sees some reason why I should be allowed to remember our meeting. When I asked Thomas to ask Jesus about the phrase “Son of Man,” the answer I got back from Jesus via Thomas was just that we should not discuss the term “Son of Man” on teachingsbyjesus.com. So, I leave all of this up to your judgment! 

Meanwhile, the Christian religion stumbles on like the unfortunate zombie that it has mostly become. I continue to hear the most awful stories! Just days ago, someone told me about a fire-and-brimstone preacher who had officiated at a woman’s recent funeral, wildly flailing his arms and with spittle flying as he condemned them all to hell, while the grieving family sat there, mortified. But there are some hopeful aspects to Christianity, too, and you can spot them here and there, like stubborn seeds of love in miraculous germination amid the smoldering ruins. The Unity Movement seemed more hopeful to me fifteen years ago than it does now, since it has become more concerned of late with the work of its early-twentieth-century founders than it is with the foundational work of Jesus. Still, Unity remains more youthful and creative than is the moribund Christianity that was its predecessor.

But I am coming to realize that the Christianity that Jesus taught does indeed need to begin anew. From the beginning. I do now see the Lord’s wisdom in that. His teachings when He first delivered them came through Him from God as a whole divine revelation, so no halfway measure of using them to try to modernize the Roman version of Christianity can ever do them justice. And for my part, the fun of feeling that I am sitting at Jesus’s feet day after day as we work on this website, and the joy of being reminded of how His mind works, is beyond what I can express. Oh, how I love Him!

Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty.
Oh thy works shall praise Thy name In earth and sky and sea.
Holy, holy, holy! Merciful and mighty.
God in three persons. Blessed Trinity.
Oh God in three persons. Blessed Trinity!
– Reginald Heber (1783-1826), from “Holy, Holy, Holy” (1826)

And for the many who have requested and been given a PDF of The Fun of Loving Jesus, Thank You! It turns out that Amazon now won’t let you post a review there unless you have bought the associated book from Amazon, but I have been happy to give the book to everyone who requested it. And if you should choose to make a Christmas gift of it to someone, that might be an opportunity to post your review. Or perhaps Barnes & Noble has more lenient rules. I have been so buried in this beautiful work that I never notice the vicissitudes of book-sales and marketing. My whole focus now is on giving our beloved Jesus His website. I am sure that all of this will sort itself out eventually!