Ep 91 - The Divine Dance

In this Trinity Sunday reflection, Fr Isaac explores the mystery of God as an eternal communion of love. Using the image of a "divine dance," he examines how the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have invited humanity into their life through creation, the Incarnation, and the gift of the Holy Spirit. Along the way, he asks a surprising question about aliens, salvation, and what the Trinity reveals about God's commitment to humanity. A thought-provoking episode about love, relationship, and our ultimate destiny in God.

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to episode 91, a brother from another father, as we celebrate Trinity Sunday today. I was recently chatting with a friend who asked me if I believed in aliens. I told him that if by aliens he meant the intelligent, self-conscious life forms like the Wookiees, the Gungans, and the Tuscan Raiders of Star Wars, then my answer would be no. Not a categorical no, but a no all the same that has a lot invested in it. For if we to accept that there were an alien species capable of moral judgments and self-reflection, we would also need to concede that God created them in God's own image, and that God would need to save them, just like God saved us in Jesus Christ. If we as Christians believe that God also had to save alien people, we would have to radically alter our idea of who the Trinity is. Part of what is so consequential about Trinitarian theology is that we believe that the structure of the Trinity, the structure of God, has been determined by the course of salvation history. Salvation history is the story of how God has saved us, beginning with a covenant made with Abraham and God's chosen people Israel, culminating in the person of Jesus Christ, who was promised before the beginning of all time. Imagine a gorge similar to the Grand Canyon, where a rock face has been sculpted by the passage of the river going through it over many thousands of years. This gorge can be taken to represent the Trinity. For just as the shape of the rock has been determined by the river, in a similar way, the Trinity has allowed itself to be shaped by salvation history, by the need to save us. God has allowed the structure of God's self to be shaped by our need for salvation, by our need for relationship with God. Salvation history, represented by the river, has coursed through the rock that is the Trinity and changed the shape of the Trinity irrevocably. As Pope Benedict XVI observed, the ascension of Jesus as both God and human person into heaven has the effect of making humanity a constituent part of the Trinity. When Jesus ascended into heaven, he ascended as both God and man, and so in a way humanity was brought into the Godhead. Humanity became a part of God through Jesus. We believe that Jesus' incarnation, his life on earth, his death and resurrection and ascension engaged God's eternal being in a participation in human time. It is not as if God had two sons and sent the elders to planet Earth and plans on sending the younger son to planet Tatooine in order to save the aliens of Star Wars. If this were the case, then God would not be a trinity, but rather a quinity. It is also not as if the incarnation was one part of salvation history, and part two will see the second person of the Trinity incarnating as a Gungan on planet Nabu, for example. No, God is a Trinity because there is only one Son who is incarnated on planet Earth for us as human beings, and there is no necessity for God to incarnate in any other planet to go and save some alien species. This is why I think that we as Christians should maintain that there probably isn't any intelligent alien life form out there. When God committed God's self to humanity through Jesus Christ, we believed that God went all in and did not hold back a part of God's self for future possible incarnations in far distant galaxies or in other multiverses. Getting to heaven and finding out that God has been speaking and communicating with alien people and saving them as well would kind of be like a woman suddenly finding out that her husband of forty years of marriage has a whole other life, a whole other wife and kids that she knew nothing about. It is of course conceivable that this is the case, but as I have already indicated, we would then have to overhaul our whole Trinitarian theology, for nothing that God has revealed about God's self thus far gives any indication that this is the case. This is why we as Christians make the very bold assertion that faith in Jesus Christ is the fullest revelation of the Father. We believe that the Holy Spirit, down through the ages, has continued to help us to process this revelation and has taken us further and deeper into the mystery of who God is than Jesus could have ever taken his disciples while he was with them on earth. This is why Jesus told his disciples that he still had many things to say to them, but that they would be too much for them to bear. But when the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide them into the fullness of the truth. Could one of the many things that Jesus didn't tell us be that there are an alien species out there that are also created in the image and likeness of God and that he must also save them? It's possible, but very unlikely, because nothing that the Spirit has revealed to us in two thousand years of Christianity since then gives us even the faintest indication of this. On the contrary, everything that salvation history has revealed to us is that we are God's only beloved people, and that God yearns to lure us into the desert and speak tender words of love to us. The doctrine of the Trinity is a love story between God and humanity. But before we ever even get to the love story between us and God, we must concede that the doctrine of the Trinity is first and foremost a love story between God and God, that love and relationship are internal to God's very nature. Long before we were even a twinkle in God's eye, God had a love affair internal to God's very self. For the longest time the three persons of the Trinity were enough for each other, until one day they decided that what they had between themselves was too good not to be shared. So at the dawn of time God created the universe and poured so much of God's self into creation that even without any of the revelation contained in our scriptures, we might come to a faltering knowledge of God just by reflecting on the beauty and complexity of the natural world. Whether we sinned or not, it was always God's plan to take on our nature and to invite us to share in the divine dance that the Trinity constitute. This was what happened at the incarnation, when the second person of the Trinity became a person like us in all things but sin. This incarnation was always going to happen even if we didn't sin, because the image of God, God's sharing of God's self that was already present in the natural world, needed to be made more explicit for us, needed to be brought out in someone like us, so that even if through our own slowness of intellect we failed to see the traces of God present in the natural world, we would now have a wake-up call in the person of Jesus, who would lead us to the fullness of the truth and enable us to understand how the divine nature that God has wanted to share with us since the beginning of all time is now here for the taking in the person of Jesus Christ. And this offer is still available to us now, even though Jesus has ascended to the Father through the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit continues to intimate to us with groanings too deep for words, as we hear in St. Paul's letter to the Romans, this invitation to union with God. May we have the grace this day to respond to this invitation and delve deeper into the mystery of the divine dance. God bless and have a good Sunday.