“Before the creation of the world, the Father, Son and Spirit set their love upon us and planned to bring us to share and know and experience the Trinitarian life itself. Unto this end the cosmos was called into being, and the human race was fashioned, and Adam and Eve were given a place in the coming of Jesus Christ, the Father’s Son himself, in and through whom the dream of our adoption would be accomplished.” Baxter Kruger, The Shack Revisited
+++++
As spiritual writer Franciscan Father Richard Rohr is so fond of reminding us, when we think about who God is, we tend to see God as a single, somewhat abstract being. Then we add to that Jesus, the Son of God, who walked the earth as our Brother and Savior and shows us that God is a constantly flowing love that flows in and between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
We see the love that Jesus had for all of humanity. We admire it. We want to have it flowing in our hearts, and from our hearts to others, but do we realize that God’s invitation is for us to choose to join in the flow of love, to join the dance of love flowing in the Persons of the Trinity? As depicted 
in Russian painter Andrei Rublev’s image, we are capable of being, and, more profoundly, invited to become, participants in the giving and receiving stream of love flowing among the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We are invited by this Triune God to die, i.e., not to be captivated by other things, and to rise to giving our all to that eternal flowing of love – the giving of love and the receiving of love.
Here are some passages on the Trinity. Drink in these writings about the invitation our Triune God offers us:
GOD IS MORE A VERB THAN A NOUN
“The Mystery of God as Trinity invites us into a dynamism, a flow, a relationship, a waterwheel of love. The Mystery says God is a verb much more than a noun. God as Trinity invites us into a participatory experience. Some of our Christian mystics went so far as to say that all of creation is being taken back into this flow of eternal life, almost as if we are a “Fourth Person” of the Eternal Flow of God or, as Jesus put it, ‘so that where I am you also may be’ (John 14:3).”
Richard Rohr OFM, The Shape of God: Deepening the Mystery of the Trinity
GOD IS A CIRCLE DANCE
“. . . the most ancient and solid theology of the Trinity proceeding from the Cappodocian fathers of the third and fourth centuries, and adopted by the Councils of the Church, says that God is a circle dance (perichoresis) of total outpouring and perfect receiving among three intimate partners, who receive their Total Self from another and then hand it on to another, who repeats the self-emptying act of love to a third …
“All is constant changing of forms through a nonstop process of loss and renewal, death and resurrection, losing the self and finding a larger self – just as in God and in the teaching of Jesus …”1 so it is with us who are “made in the image and likeness of God.”1
- Richard Rohr OFM, Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self
+++++
LOVING AND BEING LOVED, GIVING AND RECEIVING, DYING AND RISING: TRINITARIAN PATTERNS IN OUR LIVES
“Many of us started with some notion of God as an abstract Being and then, because of Jesus, we decided that this Being is also loving. Instead, the Trinitarian revelation begins with the loving–and this is the true definition of being! Most start with the One and then have trouble making it into the Flow between the Three.
“How about starting with the Three, and know that this is the shape of true Oneness? There is now a hidden communion, an Absolute Friendship at the heart of everything. The final direction of history is inevitably directed toward resurrection as Alpha becomes Omega (see Revelation 1:8; 21:6; 22:13), as both Bonaventure and Teilhard de Chardin would put it. Resurrection is no longer a one-time anomaly in the body of Jesus, but the pattern of the universe. This is much of what I talk about in my books Immortal Diamond and Eager to Love, if you want to pursue this point further.2
. . .
“The Trinitarian flow is like the rise and fall of tides on a shore. All reality can be pictured as an Infinite Outflowing that generates an Eternal Infolding. This eternal flow is echoed in history by the self-emptying of the Incarnation and the Holy Spirit’s seducing us back to God. As Meister Eckhart and other mystics say in other ways, the infolding always corresponds to the outflowing. I love the German word for Trinity, Dreifaltigheit, which literally means ‘the three infoldings.’
“The foundational good news is that creation and humanity have structurally been in this flow from the very beginning (Ephesians 1:4, 9-10; Romans 8:21-25, 29). We are not outsiders or mere spectators but inherently part of the divine dance, while ever being drawn deeper into the Divine Two-Step. Jesus said, ‘I will come back again and take you to myself, so that where I am you also may be’ (John 14:3).
“Some mystics who were on deep journeys of prayer took this message to its consistent conclusion: creation must then be seen as “the fourth person of the Blessed Trinity.” Once more, the divine dance isn’t a closed circle; we’re all invited in!
“As the independent scholar, teacher, and fishing-lure designer C. Baxter Kruger puts it:
The stunning truth is that this triune God, in amazing and lavish love, determined to open the circle and share the Trinitarian life with others. This is the one, eternal and abiding reason for the creation of the world and of human life. There is no other God, no other will of God, no second plan, no hidden agenda for human beings. Before the creation of the world, the Father, Son and Spirit set their love upon us and planned to bring us to share and know and experience the Trinitarian life itself. Unto this end the cosmos was called into being, and the human race was fashioned, and Adam and Eve were given a place in the coming of Jesus Christ, the Father’s Son himself, in and through whom the dream of our adoption would be accomplished. Baxter Kruger, The Shack Revisited(FaithWords: 2012)”
2. Richard Rohr OFM, Immortal Diamond (Jossey-Bass: 2013); Eager to Love (Franciscan Media: 2014).
