The Dance of the Universe

...and what it might reveal about God

“The Trinity reveals God more as a verb than a noun, but we rarely speak about God that way in either our preaching or prayers. God is three 'relations,’ which itself is mind-boggling for most believers. Yet the clarification opens up an honest notion of God as Mystery who can never be fully comprehended with our rational minds. God is dynamic—a verb rather than a static name. God is Interbeing Itself, and never an isolated deity that can be captured by our mind." — Richard Rohr

Everything in the universe is constantly in motion. In terms of where something is or where it’s going, we can never speak in absolute terms, but only in terms of its relationship with something else, which is itself also in motion relative to everything else around it. We tend to think of the universe as somewhat fixed and mechanistic, like a clockwork, but in reality the universe is movement, the continual unfolding of an intricate dance of relationships. One could say that the entire cosmos is, in its essence, a relational dynamic. Every single part, no matter how tiny or how vast, can only be fully known through its unfolding dynamic with everything else.

If you believe, as I do, that there’s a Something behind it all — a Divine Artist or Engineer that wove it all into being, and in some way or another inhabits it now, perhaps even reaching for us in some way, perhaps even loving us, then I suspect the nature of the universe’s design may well reveal something essential and quite marvelous about the nature of that Divine Something, which in my faith tradition we call God. What if God, through this wild, raging concoction we have named the universe, is revealing something important, perhaps even instructive, about what He is like?

What if, for example, God's nature is essentially relational too? What if God is revealed not only through everything that is, but also through the nothing between each part, and through the relational dynamic unfolding between them all. Or, as we might describe it within my faith tradition: Son, Father, and Spirit. God is the light, and the darkness, and the dance between the two.

What if God is both noun and verb, as Rohr implies in the quote above, both Being and Interbeing, both Love ( n ) and Love ( v ). Inasmuch as God is Light, no doubt He would insist on being both particle and wave — unwilling to be boxed in by one or the other. Even the Name he gave himself, that He declared to Moses at the burning bush, reflects this refusal to be contained. "I AM WHAT I AM,” which can also be translated, "I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE." Perhaps God’s nature is both essence and emergence, both form and formlessness, both revelation and mystery—and the unfolding relation between the two.

What might it be, then, to come to know such a God, or to follow His Spirit?

Perhaps it is like being led in a dance of both being and becoming, surrounded moment to moment by the gentle embrace of God’s own unfolding, with his left hand of Truth upon your back, and her right hand of Mystery holding your left. Perhaps all that’s required from us is to stand ready in that frame, to be still and present, and to not care whether you know the name of the dance. Rather, just to follow, to follow, and to delight every day at the gentle miracle of being moved by Love, step by simple step, in your own quiet relationship with the magnificent music of the universe.