An ex-priest deceased, a dog that died, and the Holy Trinity

I’ve been reading proofs, doing conferences and road trips, and dealing with home remodeling. Thinking gets too much like all the blown dust on all the various surfaces to want to gather it in any kind of a blog. However, there is something besides thought, isn’t there, and somehow in the past week or so I have felt it quite strongly. There is something called contemplation. It is a big word, but I find it preferable to meditation because meditation is something you do; contemplation is something that happens to you.


How then to write about something that is passive, something that happens when you actually stop doing things? Well, relationship is one way. I have felt the power of certain relationships.

With the conferences and connections of these past several weeks I have become very aware that there is a circuit which for me makes up a sense of the Spirit’s transforming presence. It consists (though not exclusively) of organizations like Wood Hath Hope, and Theology and Peace (http://www.theologyandpeace.org/), and the Colloquium on Violence and Religion (http://www.uibk.ac.at/theol/cover/ ), and numerous significant individuals scattered through and around all of that. I’m not saying this circuit is ideal in any way (a kind of true church), nor that it couldn’t shift or change, nor that there are no others like it, but that for me in the concrete it was a kind of fuzzy or shadow image of the circuit in God which we call the Trinity. Whoa! I can almost hear it being said. Right there seems like a huge claim. But why should it be so outlandish? Jesus said, “Be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect” and he did not mean this in any airy-fairy, holier-than-thou kind of way, but one absolutely concrete and real. What he meant was that his followers would become part of the circle of absolute giving and living which he experienced from his Father and was teaching to the rest of us.

A possible translation or paraphrase of “perfect” is “one who has reached the end or goal.” What it means for Jesus, however, is paradoxical. It means that the end or goal of the Father is the beginning of another in love. Jesus experiences the Father as pouring himself out completely for him and for the world. And then anyone who imitates the Father reaches his or her goal or end by giving himself/herself reciprocally for the sake of, for the beginning of the other. Jesus of course does this first and supremely, and then putting the Spirit into the picture creates an endless circle of giving between a threesome. This becomes the meaning of Trinity, where each for ever allows the other to receive the boundless life arising from the first giving. When we begin to imitate the Father and Jesus the circuit becomes a foursome, with the fourth member made up of millions and millions of individuals or sub-circuits replaying the life of the original circuit. Each individual or small human circuit imitates the Trinity, with one individual or group continuing the love of the one before and giving his/her/their life for the next, and so on, on and on! The circuit creates a circle full of ends which are always beginnings, and so is wonderfully end-less!

Just sensing this circuit, at any level, is an event of contemplation.

But, of course, this sense can easily disappear. It only takes something to go wrong, for someone to have a difference of opinion and begin to reciprocate with anger or negation, and the experience of the end-less circle of the Trinity disappears like morning mist. And we are left as always with the harsh glare of a violent world order.

So, again, how to communicate this strong sense of contemplation, to say that it’s really real, so you can feel it and overcome the world?

This week in Syracuse I experienced two deaths both of which touched me personally. The first was a former R.C. priest, a well-known and well-loved married and family man, social advocate, peace activist, ex-director of a L’Arche house, and all round good guy. Frank was gentle and thoughtful, someone who modeled nonviolence and, more than anyone I know, evinced the Spirit-given compatibility of priesthood and marriage. There were hundreds and hundreds at the calling hours; it took for ever for the crowd slowly to snake round to greet his widow. And the other death? Well, it was that of a German Shepherd dog called Ginger. I knew this dog through her owner whom I often met while walking my own dog, Sofia. This man loved his dog, caring for her through multiple health problems, spending thousands if not tens of thousands on treatments and operations. I did a little private calling hour with this man stopping my car by his house where so often before he had hung out in his yard with his dog. I listened to the story of Ginger’s final days and felt the connection for him when he said his dog was “one in ten mil.”

There’s no way the significance of the dog’s life can be measured against Frank’s. Frank will be remembered by history, Ginger will not. Frank impacted many thousands of people, on moral and philosophical issues of human dignity, destiny, God, war, peace etc. The dog impacted only one life, and in that basically nonconceptual way in which we relate to dogs and cats etc. She was a dumb animal. But Ginger was intensely meaningful to her owner, and when it comes to that kind of meaning in the human heart, you can’t really make a hierarchy between the meaning that Frank represented for his community and the meaning that Ginger had for her owner. This kind of meaning is an imponderable mix, of love, companionship, present peace, proximity, hope, pleasure. Between these cases, Frank’s and Gingers’s, therefore, there is an undeniable continuum, of human meaning, truth, of reality, and as I connected with this meaning in both these cases I entered a kind of field of contemplation, a place where I shared these deep sensations.

Ah, that then is perhaps a way of describing it! The senses that arise when through love we feel a life poured forth in love, and it fills us with more love, and with associated peace, compassion, gentleness, hope. Contemplation is a Trinity moment, one that is always seeking to take over the whole world.

By making the meaning of contemplation continuous with the meaning of a human life, the meaning of a dog’s life, we see how completely real it is. Christians too often see contemplation as something that touches on a separate realm of existence, heavenly, out of this world. No, it touches this world, and in the most truly meaningful way.

What would it be like if Christians lived in a continual state of Trinity contemplation, of deep transformative meaning, in the same way that Ginger’s owner lived and lives in emotions related to his dog, and Frank’s friends and admirers live in relation to the emotions he invokes? What would it be like, if prayer and its inner sense were to be that real?

Tony