Last week, I spoke on the birthday of the church, about the beloved community—a community of holy fools of God following Christ. Spirit as a mischief maker in our community is rooted in the imitation and following the holy foolishness of Jesus message about God’s reign.

The beloved community resists imitating churches throughout history who have been violent and intolerance of difference or non-conformity. I describe myself and hopefully yourselves as living an “embodied non-compliance” or “embodied mischief” to institutional Christianity. One of the erroneous perspectives of Christians is to visualize linearly the threefold divine community of Christ: God as Creator as old man full of wisdom and power, Jesus as the Christ who was sent to die on the cross and rise from the dead, and the Holy Spirit who becomes active in the world as Jesus has ascended to heaven.

But the mystery of the threefold divine community of love can be approached through what we know of the relationship of God to humanity and creation. And it can also be known through understanding of Jesus God’s Christ to us and through the Holy Spirit.

Our faith holds to a being –we name God with a divine unity yet threefold distinct constellations of energy force.

Orthodox Christianity understands God as three and one as a universal spiral dance (perichoresis) of a community of love. God is three: Parent begetting Child, God Child begotten, and the Holy Spirit generated from their love and as procession. It is a divine community of radical inclusive and polyamorous love, but this radical inclusive of three loving partners is metaphorically image as a spiraling, ecstatic dance (perichoresis) that breaks down all barriers of other by the dynamic and loving movement of interpenetrating communion. Leonardo Boff describes this dynamic:

Perichoresis means one person’s action permeates the other and allows itself to be permeated by that person. The interpenetration expresses the love and life that constitutes the divine nature. It is the very nature of love to be self-communicating, life naturally expands and seeks to multiply itself. Thus, the divine Three from all eternity find themselves in an infinite explosion of love and life from one to the other. (Boff)

It is a divine communion of radical inclusive love expressed in the creative image of line dancing. I want to think of folks participating in country dancing at Oil Can Harry’s in Studio City (CA). The partners in God are dancing circling with each other, changing positions in love, and the whole floor is whirling in a dynamic two-step dance. The partners inter-permeate or interpenetrate each other in an eternal and universe-spinning egalitarian dance. Each person spirally empties self and mutually surrenders to the other two, giving life, love, wisdom, goodness. The dancing of the three within God, circling in mutual love is dynamic and playful mystery of love, contagiously spiraling open and inclusively and lovingly pulling us into that dance of love. If God is dancing with all creation and us, God invites us to join in a community of dance.

If you place one hand on the wrist of your other arm, you will feel your pulse. If you utter word “grace” to each beat and continue to be mindful of the beat, you are hearing the divine dance of the trinity entangled in creation and in you. This reminds me that God’s dance is the green grace of life, and it points out that we do not live alone or for ourselves but live within the web of all life entangled with God.

There are two aspects of the divine threefold community that we carry as image and likeness in ourselves. Perichoresis or divine interrelating is a way of life, it is art of being ourselves. It is the instinct or drive to communion within ourselves and all life and towards God. Let me speak about God’s image and likeness and communion as concrete aspects of divine life in ourselves.

So interrelationship and communion are the traces of God within ourselves. These must be reflected with ourselves and creation.

Our scriptural heritage at the beginning of Genesis maintains that we are made in the image and likeness of God. How are we made in the image and likeness of God? Earlier Christian writers affirmed it was maleness the decisive factor. But what about women? Are they not made in the image of God? Some argued that women reflected the image of a male God only if they were controlled by the male husbands or male clergy if they were nuns.

Others have argued that it is our intellect and rationality reflect the image of God. I think this falls short, for it removes the richness of our emotional lives that connect us to God and one another. I want to suggest another aspect that
Our modern western heritage promotes a strong individualism with an emphasis on achievement and successes. We are seen as the pinnacle of God’s creation, and everything is about us. We think of ourselves as individuals, perhaps members of society of individuals or of the United States.

The poet Wallace Stevens writes, “Nothing is itself taken alone. Things are because of interrelationships.” Everything is related to everything else.
See ourselves as part of the web of life, an incredibly vast, complex, subtle, beautiful web that amazes us can call forth our concern.

The Earth Charter from the 1990s states as its first principle, “Respect Earth and life in all its diversity. Recognize that all beings are interdependent and every form of life has value regardless of its worth to human beings.” (Earth Charter)

We have forgotten that humanity was made from humus, or the soil, and that Adam and Eve, son and daughter of the Earth and our ancestors, came from Adamá, land of fertility.

If we withdraw in prayer into our center, we discover that we are not alone. The root of existence is God, and we are immediately and wonderfully in touch with God.

The spiritual practices of peoples of faith—Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, or indigenous peoples—lead us to discover that we exist in relationship to everything else. We are interconnected to a vast network of relationships where God abides, animates, and sustains those relationships.

There is no such things as a self that is separated, isolated, or individual. Even physics points us that nothing exists in isolation, but exists in relationship to something else, and that something is also related to vast number of something elses as well. This is goes to the farthest parts of the unimagined vast universe.
All life is interrelated to us. Prayer allows us to enter the cosmic dance of God as community. We meet the God: “For in God, we live and move have our being.” (Acts17:28)

Brian Swimme, a mathematical cosmologist, in Hs wonderful book and documentary, Journey of the Universe, that are isolation and loneliness are unreal cosmic states. Spiritual author Kathleen Fischer notes,

For we are born from the Earth community and are deeply bonded to it, relatives of atoms and bacteria, roses and sparrows, insects and whales, galaxies and planets. …

Every child should know she is the energy of the sun and feel her face shining with the joy found in it this primordial relationship. Sunlight streams though the oceans and hums in the forests. We learn from the sun’s generosity in bestowing energy, discovering the in its underlying impulse of the universe our own urge to contribute to the wider community. Swimme tells us to contemplate the solar system in which the Earth is swung around its massive cosmic partner, the sun, “is to touch an ocean of wonder as you take the first step into inhabiting the actual universe and solar system and the Earth.” Yes we are pilgrims, but each moment of our journey we are filled with the light from the beginning of time, from the birthplace of the universe fifteen billion light years away. Suffuse with the vision of the universe, we might be moved to pause on our journey, lifting our faces to the sun to take in energy of God’s love.

We human beings fall prey to a false perspective that we are alone and isolated selves, we get caught in desperate attempts to immerse ourselves in consumerism and materialism, failing to appreciate how are connected to a universe of interconnected realities. We are interrelated to everything and never separated.

This realization of our interconnectedness and interrelatedness I would suggest is what is our likeness and image of God. We are interrelated as a community of life.

The second aspect of God as threefold community of inclusive love is the drive we have towards community. Our interrelation with God who reveals Godself in creation and to us in history invites us to deepen the bonds of connection or love with one another. Our interrelatedness to the Earth and other life and to one another includes a sense of community. Community that reflects the divine community of love is always radically inclusive. It is neither exclusive of humanity only nor is exclusive of only certain types of people. Jesus’ teaching is instructive here: “Be compassionate as God is compassionate to you.”
Compassion is the nature of our God, and we are invited to imitate compassion.

One of the best definitions of compassion I have found is by Henri Nouwen:

Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human…

Compassion includes several related notions: radical inclusiveness and hospitality; identification with the suffering, the poor, and marginalized life; to engage the suffering of others and alleviate their suffering; feasting together to celebrate God’s reign in our midst.

Radical inclusive love and hospitality welcomes those who are different from ourselves into relationship of care and sharing. Compassion keeps open to outside, always vigilant to expand include the excluded. It builds on the nature, reflecting the image and likeness of God as interrelated to everything but deepens that interrelationships into an explicit community of equality and love.
Ideally we move into deepening our community, always welcoming and caring for the stranger and those who are different, and love for one another, we celebrate the diversity of the community of life. The divine communion is open and inviting, thus it critiques social exclusions and hierarchies. We image in an imperfect way that original grace of divine inclusion of creation and the final welcoming fully of all created life into the love life of God.

At the heart of the threefold divine community of love is there divine sharing and participation of the actions of love together. The experience of the one is also simultaneously the experience of all three. From all eternity, they are interwoven and interrelating, and that means they are interwoven and interrelated in our living out the grace of our image and likeness of God.