June 9

The retreat was amazing.  No other word for it.  Those women blew the lid off the place.  I cried for days, just releasing energy that was in that room.  It’s taken me all week to recover!  Thank God, thank you God, for a retreat day and a quiet week.  Thank you for brave women.  Now that’s what I call Pentecost!

And now, as we move toward Trinity Sunday, I’m reading Bede Griffiths.  In his search for points of commonality with all religions, he also touched on what is distinctive about Christianity: not, for him, the place of Jesus, but rather the Trinity.  The awareness of plurality and movement in the heart of the Godhead struck him as the unique gift of Christianity to the world.  I don’t know enough about other religions to know if it’s true that this is so unique, but his words made me sit up and look again at the power of the Trinity.

God is love: not merely the love that God sends into the world, the love we share with God, but the love within the Godhead itself.  God loves, in an endless flow.  God’s love for us is like the meteors that shower us; it is the overflow, the scattering, of a love that is perfect within itself.   And our love in return is the bounce of that same love, like light bouncing off a mirror.  But it’s not just a reflection of one thing: it is authentic, distinct, and yet one with the greater light.

This brings me back to forgiveness.  Henri Nouwen wrote, “Forgiveness is love practiced among people who love badly.”  Forgiveness repairs the gaps and the tears in the fabric of love.  In our daily lives we experience ourselves as not only distinct but as separate, even opposed, and so we hurt one another.  Forgiveness clears the ground for the dance of love to begin again.

I’m asking forgiveness more and more.  I’m granting forgiveness more and more.  My life is richer because of these.  And that is what God desires, what Jesus promises: abundant life.  In that abundant life I am free to dance with the One in Three, to find myself in God and God in me.  May you, may we, share that life today and always.