Trinity and Identity

I want here to give a brief account of who we are as created persons living in a reality upheld by the Triune God. There are a baffling number of images of who we are presented within the Judeo-Christian tradition. We are variously lost and found; sinners and saints; justified and glorified; children of God and servants of Christ; made in God's image yet destroyers of that image; created and mortal, yet eternal and immortal. We partake in the Divine Nature and yet are alienated from that same Source. 

If we widen the images to include the other great world religions-- which I believe Christ is at work in implicitly even though he is explicitly known in Jesus-- the images of who we are grows even wider. For Hindus the Self is God, or rather Atman is Brahman. And yet the individual self is deluded by illusion, so that the self rarely realizes it's true nature in The Self. But when the self breaks free of its chains of illusion, it can become an avatar, or embodiment of Brahman in human form.

For Buddhists, the self is empty, but not empty in the sense of being "unreal". Rather, the self shares in that Ultimate Reality of Nirvana, which is empty of all concepts and categories and ideas, precisely because it transcends all that can be thought. To realize our true identity, we must then empty ourselves of cravings for permanence and identity, and realize our emptiness in Emptiness. When we do this, we realize that we are connected with all other illusory selves in a great web of interdependence, and we are thus filled with great compassion and the desire to liberate all others from their suffering. Then we become a bodhisattva, or vehicle of enlightenment, for others.

For other Asian Religions, we are manifestations of the Transcendent Tao, or Way, or Path, who may realize our true nature by actualizing the Chi Energy which flows through the natural order of things. When we turn westward, Islam seems entirely different. At first blush, Islam seems to be much more conservative than all other religions, insisting that we are mere creatures made by, and servants of, Allah. Since Allah has no partners, it would seem we cannot partake in Allah, nor are we "children" of Allah. And yet, in Sufi Islam, there is the realization that only Allah ultimately exists, and thus the whole world is an expression of Allah (how could it not be, after all?). And because of this, Sufi mystics often realize such a close identification with Allah, that they speak of God as "I" and "me", and come to see themselves as incarnations of God.

In Ancient Greek philosophy, especially as exemplified by Aristotle, the "soul" or "self" of a person is the "form" that inhabits that person, and shapes how they experience and react to life. Another way of speaking of form is to say "pattern": The "soul" is that pattern of self-- thoughts, feelings, habits, choices-- which makes us who we are. Modern psychology and computer science thinks largely along these lines as well. Persons are by nature pattern recognition devices, taking stimuli in from the outside world, processing them through the complex set of patterns and algorithms that make up our personality, finding the meaning or purpose inherent in those patterns, and then responding to that stimuli according to our ingrained patterns of behavior. And while I would be very reluctant to reduce persons to MERELY patterns, there does seem to be truth in the idea that pattern and form are essential to what it means to be a person.

What is a Christian to make out of all of this? If God is a Triune Reality, as disclosed in Jesus by the power of the Spirit, how should we make sense of our identity as incarnate persons in the Incarnated God? If we are to assume that other religions have some genuine insight into God-- just as the Hebrews and Greeks did before Jesus, which were incorporated into the New Testament understanding of what God has done in Christ-- what can we make of how we relate to God? If God has revealed Godself as "I AM who I AM" (cf. Exodus 3.14), what does this mean for us when we ponder who we are?

In short: "Who am I in the reality of I AM?"

I think we must start with the One who we claim to be the Incarnation of Godself in human form. If we can understand what is being claimed about him, we may have a key to understand what is being claimed about ourselves. The Classic Christian claim is that Jesus is the unique embodiment of the Eternal Logos of God-- the Word of God, the Message of God, the Mind of God-- in a fully human person. The Self of all selves, the Pattern that contains all patterns, the Set of all sets, the Potential that gives rise to all actualities, is the Logos, or Message, or Way, or Path. This Logos is the eternal self-expression of the Transcendent Value, who is the Source of all realities, who Christians call Father, Muslims call Allah, Jews call HaShem, Hindus call Brahman, and Buddhists call Nirvana. 

That Logos, the Self-Expression of the Source, empties itself to be uniquely incarnated in Jesus Christ: In Him the Eternal Self becomes a created self. All other incarnations-- whether avatars or bodhisattvas, saints or sinners-- are created selves progressively realizing their identity in the One Self who gives birth to all other selves. Sometimes this realization is painfully slow, as each person struggles through sin and ignorance, hells and heavens, to realize their unity with the Logos. Other times this realization is blindingly fast, as a person recognizes their true self in the Divine Self in an instantaneous epiphany. In all cases, the path to fully recognizing who we are and whose we are lies in finding our pattern interwoven into the Eternal Pattern that gives shape and form to the entire cosmos of lived experience.

This realization happens only by the power of the Divine Energy who works through all worlds to actualize every possibility in the Infinite Potential who is the Logos. This Energy is known as the Holy Spirit of God in Semitic Faiths, as Shakti in Hindu Spirituality, and as Chi in Asian Paths. This Spirit is that power which draws us into, and inspires us to try to realize, all that is good and true and beautiful in every situation, thus manifesting the Divine Potential inherent in the Logos. The whole cosmos is thus part of the unfolding self-expression of this threefold God, as the Spirit progressively unfolds and realizes the potential of the Logos in the field of space-time, and thus brings to fulfillment the Self-Expression of the Father's Love. 

So we may say with Saint Paul we exist "in Christ", and "I no longer live but Christ lives in me", and "in him we live and move and exist". We may say with Saint Peter that we are "partakers of the Divine Nature" through Christ by the Power of the Spirit. While it is never correct for me to say "I am God", it is also never correct for me to say "I am not God". Rather, at my best, repenting from my worst, I am a facet of God's Self-Expression in time and space, and after I have lived my Earthly life, all of my experience will be gathered into Christ's life and joined with God forever, transposed into higher dimensions than I can currently conceive. In Christ we will be resurrected and embodied to manifest all the fullness of who God made us to be. 

In the final calculation, we can say that our self is the same kind of Self that the Logos is, for we are formed in his image and his likeness. In both cases of the Divine Self and individual selves, we are subjects who experience ourselves as "I am", able to make meaning out of the patterns we find around us and within us, and communicate that meaning with other selves. And yet, the difference is in the extent of our awareness of, and relatedness to, other selves. Individual selves are finite, only partially aware of other selves, and only communicating with some of these selves. The Divine Self is infinite, exhaustively aware of all facets of every other self, and always communicating with other selves by upholding their very being and weaving them into the Grand Pattern that is Godself. The finite individual self will never become the Infinite Divine Self, although it can infinitely grow into greater and greater union with Divine Self who transcends all.

[Another way of understanding this from the perspective of the Divine Authorship of the Story of the Universe can be found HERE.]

This eternal self-giving of communion and communication between the individual self and the Divine Self is best pictured for me in the mystical vision of "The Great Dance" in Perelandra by C. S. Lewis. In this Science Fiction tale, an angel gives the protagonist a vision of how God relates to life forms and persons on innumerable planets, giving the Divine Self to them in ways appropriate to their culture, limitations, and biology. Although the text is far too long to quote here in full, relevant portions include:

"The Great Dance does not wait to be perfect until the peoples of the Low Worlds are gathered into it. We speak not of when it will begin. It has begun from before always. There was no time when we [angels] did not rejoice before His face as now. The dance which we dance is at the centre and for the dance all things were made. Blessed be He!"

"All which is not itself the Great Dance was made in order that He might come down into it. In the Fallen World He prepared for Himself a body and was united with the Dust and made it glorious for ever. This is the end and final cause of all creating, and the sin whereby it came is called Fortunate and the world where this was enacted is the centre of worlds. Blessed be He!"

"Each grain is at the centre. The Dust is at the centre. The Worlds are at the centre. The beasts are at the centre. The ancient peoples are there. The race that sinned is there... The gods are there also. Blessed be He!”

"Where [God] is, there is the centre. He is in every place. Not some of Him in one place and some in another, but in each place the whole [of God], even in the smallness beyond thought. There is no way out of the centre save into the Bent Will which casts itself into the Nowhere. Blessed be He!"

"Each thing was made for Him.. He is the centre. Because we are with Him, each of us is at the centre. It is not as in a city of the Darkened World where they say that each must live for all. In His city all things are made for each. When He died in the Wounded World He died not for me, but for each man." 

"If each man had been the only man made, he would have done no less. Each thing, from the single grain of Dust to the strongest [angel], is the end and the final cause of all creation and the mirror in which the beam of His brightness comes to rest and so returns to Him. Blessed be He!"

"And now, by a transition which he did not notice, it seemed that what had begun as speech was turned into sight, or into something that can be remembered only as if it were seeing. He thought he saw the Great Dance. It seemed to be woven out of the intertwining undulation of many cords or bands of light, leaping over and under one another and mutually embraced in arabesques and flower-like subtleties."

"Each figure as he looked at it became the master-figure or focus of the whole spectacle, by means of which his eye disentangled all else and brought it into unity – only to be itself entangled when he looked to what he had taken for mere marginal decorations and found that there also the same hegemony was claimed, and the claim made good, yet the former pattern not thereby dispossessed but finding in its new subordination a significance greater than that which it had abdicated."

"He could see also (but the word 'seeing' is now plainly inadequate) wherever the ribbons or serpents of light intersected, minute corpuscles of momentary brightness: and he knew somehow that these particles were the secular generalities of which history tells – peoples, institutions, climates of opinion, civilisations, arts, sciences, and the like – ephemeral coruscations that piped their short song and vanished. The ribbons or cords themselves, in which millions of corpuscles lived and died, were things of some different kind. At first he could not say what. But he knew in the end that most of them were individual entities." 

"If so, the time in which the Great Dance proceeds is very unlike time as we know it. Some of the thinner and more delicate cords were beings that we call shortlived: flowers and insects, a fruit or a storm of rain, and once (he thought) a wave of the sea. Others were such things as we also think lasting: crystals, rivers, mountains, or even stars. Far above these in girth and luminosity and flashing with colours from beyond our spectrum were the lines of the personal beings, and yet as different from one another in splendour as all of them from all the previous class." 

"But not all the cords were individuals; some were universal truths or universal qualities. It did not surprise him then to find that these and the persons were both cords and both stood together against the mere atoms of generality which lived and died in the clashing of their streams: but afterwards, when he came back to earth, he wondered."

"And by now the thing must have passed altogether out of the region of sight as we understand it. or he says that the whole solid figure of these enamoured and inter-animated circlings was suddenly revealed as the mere superficies of a far vaster pattern in four dimensions, and that figure as the boundary of yet others in other worlds: till suddenly as the movement grew yet swifter, the interweaving yet more ecstatic, the relevance of all to all yet more intense, as dimension was added to dimension and that part of him which could reason and remember was dropped farther and farther behind that part of him which saw, even then, at the very zenith of complexity, complexity was eaten up and faded, as a thin white cloud fades into the hard blue burning of the sky, and a simplicity beyond all comprehension, ancient and young as spring, illimitable, pellucid, drew him with cords of infinite desire into its own stillness."

And so, we finally come to rest at the Center of all. There we find we are all at the center, because the Center is within us, animating our very being and supplying the very freedom we need to be separate selves from the Self who is in all. And it is this Self who calls to us in the still small voice in the center of our being: I am yours and you are mine. And thus I may say at last, without too much distortion:

I exist in Christ,
And Christ works through me,
My deepest self realizes my true identity
In the Self who is the Source of All.