THE GOLDEN STRING
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Trinity, Creation and the Energy of Love

by Brian J. Pierce, OP

One is beginning without any beginning. Likeness is beginning begotten of the One alone...It is the nature of love to arise and flow out of two as a one. One as one is not love; two as two is not love; but two as one must needs produce natural, willing, ardent love. (Meister Eckhart, The Book of Divine Comfort)

What Meister Eckhart, the great medieval mystic, pointed to almost seven hundred years ago in these words about the power of love present in the Oneness of God, was exquisitely woven into a talk given by Father Bede Griffiths in Australia in 1985. In the talk, entitled "Eastern Mysticism and Christian Faith," Fr. Bede pointed to the dynamic process of differentiation in the Godhead, which forms the basis for the doctrine of the Trinity, and its connections with God's outpouring manifestation in creation. What Fr. Bede underlines is how the Father's flowing out through love into the creation of the universe is none other than the same outpouring of the Father in the Trinitarian begetting of the Son, the divine Logos.

Fr. Bede begins by calling attention to the web of interrelationships of which we are all part, in and among ourselves, and with God. As he was so fond of doing, Fr. Bede draws on the wisdom of the New Physics to point to a scientific way of talking about the energy fields which hold us all together in an interdependent whole. He then says that the same inter-being (to use Thich Nhat Hanh's phrase) is also at the heart of the fluid process of differentiation in the Godhead. "We all come from the Source, the Absolute, which is an interdependent relationship," he says. God's inter-being and ours is one. Bede points to this interdependence in the Hindu tradition, showing how there is a dynamic interplay between Shiva and Shakti, a vibration of energy and movement, called Spanda. "The whole creation comes into being through that Spanda, through the vibration between Shiva and Shakti," says Fr. Bede. It is, he notes, a transcendent reality, a divine movement, which becomes manifest in the created world.

Moving then to the Buddhist tradition, Bede draws on a quote from a great Zen teacher, Suzuki, in which he said that "Sunyata is not static but dynamic." So even in Buddhism, even in the great emptiness of sunyata, notes Bede, there is a movement, a tendency towards outpouring. "In the void there is a constant urge to differentiate itself. And the whole creation is the differentiation of the void...At the very moment of the differentiation it returns to itself. It is always coming out and returning." The void flows out in differentiation and simultaneously returns to the void. "That is why the Buddhists say that Nirvana and Samsara are the same," says Fr. Bede. "Ultimately they are one."

Then Fr. Bede moves to the Christian tradition, always intent on bridging the great traditions, forging a oneness while respecting the differences. "In the Christian Trinity," he says, "we have the Father. He is the Ground, the Source, the Origin, the One beyond. And the One is always expressing itself in the Logos. That is the principle of differentiation in the Godhead." So already one begins to note the common ground in the traditions, namely, that within the One there is an urge toward differentiation. As in both the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, Bede then draws the connection between the differentiation within the One and the birth of creation. "In that Logos the whole world comes into being." So for Bede, the outpouring within the Godhead that is the basis for the dynamic interrelationship between Father, Son and Spirit is shared with the whole of creation.

At this point in his talk Fr. Bede draws on Eckhart's "birth of the Word" theme. "God speaks one Word, and in that one Word the whole creation, all time and space, come into being and are manifest in this universe." One cannot help but hear echos from both Genesis and the prologue of John's gospel here: "In the beginning God said....In the beginning was the Word..." And just as the Divine Logos bridges the creation story in Genesis with the enfleshed Word in John's gospel, so, too, do Eckhart and Bede bring together into a unique oneness both the uttering of the Word within the Godhead (the Father begetting the Son) and the uttering of that same Word in creation. Eckhart says in Sermon 22: "The Father is a speaking work and the Son is the speech at work...The Father speaks the Son unspoken, and he remains within." And again he adds, "What does it avail me that this birth is always happening, if it does not happen in me?...In the inmost spring I well up in the Holy Ghost, where there is one life, one being and one work. All that God works is one; therefore God begets me as His Son without any difference" (Sermons 1 and 65). So for Eckhart, as for Bede, there is only one birth of the Word, the Logos of God, and that birth is simultaneously the Father giving birth to the Son in the unity of the divine nature, and the Father giving birth to the Word in creation ("In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God...God said: Let there be light, and there was light").

Fr. Bede continues, "So the Logos is the principle of differentiation in the Godhead which differentiates itself in the world. And at the very moment of differentiation, there is a movement of return in the Holy Spirit. The circle is completed. The energy of love unites the Father and the Son." It is here where Fr. Bede brings the Trinitarian reflection to its core in the dynamic energy of love. Love is at the heart of God's own differentiation, the outpouring into the Logos and the return, through the Spirit, to the Source. What is remarkable in this reflection of Fr. Bede's is how he so closely connects the Trinity's own internal dynamism of love to that same movement of energy in creation. In the beginning, when God's Logos poured out in love from the Ground of the Father, so also did all of creation flow out in love from the bosom of God. And it is in that same energy of love that all returns to the Source from which it flowed. The Logos and creation are one in the Father's outpouring of love. Eckhart says, "In the love that one gives there is no duality but one and unity, and in love I am God more than I am in myself... That sounds strange, that a person can become God in love, but so it is true in the eternal truth, nad our Lord Jesus Christ possesses it" (Sermon 13a). What Christ is by nature and through the eternal outpouring and inpouring of love in the Godhead, we are by grace. In true love there is no duality.

Fr. Bede continues: "In the same way as the universe comes forth from God in the Word, it is always returning in the Spirit. That is the rhythm of the universe. We all come forth from the One, manifest in the world, and return." The coming forth and the returning to God are the movement of love, the manifestation of the playfulness of divine energy. This again is what the Hindus speak of in referring to the energy of Spanda, resulting from the vibrations between Shiva and Shakti. The Holy Spirit is the energy of love which is bringing all of creation - through, with and in the Logos - back to the heart of God. Not to move back to the Source, not to complete the Trinitarian cycle in the dynamism of divine love, is to sin against love. Or as Fr. Bede puts it, "We have to turn the wheel of the law and not stop here and cling to this world and to ourselves. That is sin, ignorance...We don't return to the One."

As a way of summary, then, we might say that Bede is pointing to a oneness in the divine outpouring and inpouring, making the begetting of the Son and the birth of creation one single act of interdependent love. It is Eckhart again who makes the bold statement that there really comes to be no difference between the Logos, the second Person of the Trinity, and our own souls. "You must not merely be like the Son, you must be the Son yourself" (Sermon 14b). And in a lovely image, recalling the young Jesus' breaking from the caravan and returning to the Temple in Jerusalem, Eckhart says, "If you would find this birth (of God in us), you must leave the crowd and return to the source and ground whence you came" (Sermon 4). Fr. Bede would perhaps sum up his own words something like this: Just as in the Father's speaking of the Logos in eternity, the Word became flesh in creation, so, too, does the Spirit, who is love and divine energy, carry us, in the same Logos, back to the Source. Our being (Sat) finds its very ground in the Godhead, flows out in conscious oneness with the Logos-Christ (Chit), and returns in a continuous flow of blissful love back to the Source (Ananda).

It was, in fact, after his first stroke, in the final months of his life, that Fr. Bede spoke so often of being "overwhelmed by love." Was he not conscious that he was nearing the very Source from which he had come? His consciousness was Christ-consciousness, and already he had begun to drink from the well of bliss in the Spirit. Love had overwhelmed him, and he was returning to its Source. May we, who sit at the feet of this great teacher, allow ourselves also to be overwhelmed by love, and with all of creation, to return to our true home in the heart of God.

(Quotes from Fr. Bede are taken from an audio cassette of his talk at Deaken University in Australia, "Eastern Mysticism and Christian Faith,", May, 1985. Quotes from Meister Eckhart are taken from the three volume collection: Meister Eckhart, Sermons and Treatises, trans. and ed. by Maurice O'C. Walshe, Element Books, 1979.)