My friend Laurie and I have been reading Cynthia Bourgeault’s The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three.  One of Bourgeault’s central points is that we make a mistake when we think about God as a person, and the Trinity as persons. What if we were to think in terms of process, rather than persons? Not Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but Unmanifest, Manifesting, Manifested. Her emphasis in this formulation is on action. God is unmanifest, huge cosmic, beyond our knowing and understanding. God is manifesting, reaching out to us, trying to lead and teach us. God is manifested, active in our lives, a continuous presence.

I really like this, but I am given pause by one aspect of it, mostly because it seems to contradict some of my thoughts on the spirituality of improv. Bourgeault describes this trinitarian process as affirming, denying, and reconciling. If God is unmanifest, than “God manifesting” is really the opposite of that. God, who is beyond our understanding, becomes human in Jesus, and is therefore understandable, or at least partially so. These first two movements of the Trinity seem to contradict each other. How can something that is eternally beyond our knowing become known? For Bourgeault, this is exactly the magic of the process. We affirm one thing, then we affirm something that contradicts it, and then we find that, instead of existing in continuous opposition to each other, a third thing happens that reconciles the first two. So the ineffable, mysterious God becomes known in Jesus Christ, and remains both known and deeply mysterious in the actions of the Holy Spirit.

Another book I’m reading, Scott Weems Ha!: The Science of When We Laugh and Why has helped me to understand this. In fact, reading the two books together has been positively thrilling! Weems, a neuroscientist, says that our brains are full of contradictory thoughts. They’re a little like the United Nations, where countries are in constant and vociferous arguments with each other. Sometimes these arguments are about petty things, but sometimes they entail the clash of world views. But our minds don’t just leave these thoughts in conflict. Our minds work to reconcile them, and it’s the very process of reconciling two discordant thoughts that causes us to laugh. Humor is the result of reconciliation.

You can see the parallel to Bourgeault. Essentially, she’s describing with theology the same process that Weems is describing with neuroscience. For the first time in my life, I find science and theology actively supporting each other, pointing to exactly the same thing and describing exactly the same process. I laughed when I realized this, and then realized that I had just experienced in my body the exact process that the books were talking about. Theology attempts to describe the unmanifested. Neuroscience describes the manifesting. I laugh because I realize that these two seemingly oppositional disciplines have been reconciled, and the trinity is fully manifested in my laughter.

Pretty good stuff, right? Being excited about this, I’ve begun to wonder how it might change the way I pray. Traditionally, Christian prayer starts with an invocation, often an invocation of the Trinity as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I’m wondering what kind of trinitarian invocations we can use that invoke process, rather than persons. It seems to me that such an invocation would succeed best if it could actually trigger the process of affirming, denying, and reconciling in the people who are praying it. The art work and the poem I created to try to express this is just a first attempt, and I don’t think I really got it right. But I share it with you now, and will share other attempts as I continue to try to develop this practice.

A final thought about improv. At first I thought that Bourgeault might be contradicting one of the tenets of improv by claiming that denying is part of trinitarian process. In improv, denial is a real problem, and improv practitioners are taught to yes/and things, not deny them. But if Weems is right, I think that denial is baked-in to improv, although not in the way we usually think of it. Two actors take the stage. They both have things that they’re going to say, and ways that they’re going to react to each other. One gifts the scene with an opening statement, such as “tell our kids to be quiet.” This would be the “affirming” moment in Bourgeault’s scheme. The other then has to set aside whatever they were going to say, and whatever character they thought they might be playing. They are denying their own ideas in order to favor another person’s ideas. “Okay,” they say to themselves, “I’m not a lumberjack, I’m a parent. Or maybe I’m a great big lumberjack daddy!” They accept the gift the other actor has given them, and add to it, and this is the moment of reconciliation, which is why it’s funny. It’s also why it’s holy.

Pray for the disciples of the stilled waves

who can’t conceive of a mind formed from the firing synapses of suns, with a plan that’s existed since existence began.

Pray for the disciples who find it too strange

that such a mind might look down at the ocean with a scheme for each life, a schematic laid down, never to change.

Pray for the disciples who don’t believe, but can see

His feet skim across the waves, who believe in miracles when they occur, who prefer not God’s providence, but God’s fleeing order.

I’ve struggled with the idea of providence for a long time. Whenever someone says that a tragedy is God’s will, or claims that God never closes a door without opening a window, or says that something is part of God’s plan, I rebel. These sayings seem to make God into a puppet-master at best, a sociopath at worst. Why is it comforting to think that God is actively causing our hurt?

Such an idea isn’t supported by scripture. God is definitely involved with human life. But there’s nothing that points to God having a master plan. Abraham argues with God about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and although God ultimately does destroy those cities, Abraham’s argument holds sway for a little while. God formulates plans that don’t work out, and then seems open to shifting them. Noah’s rainbow points to this, as does the whole plan to make a chosen people who are going to be a light to the nations, and then God’s willingness to ditch that plan when it doesn’t work and send Jesus down to try out something new. In scripture, God doesn’t have a grand, sweeping plan that’s been around from the very beginning of creation. God does have a vision of what’s best for human life, and is always pointing us towards that vision. But usually this isn’t what people mean when they say that something is all part of God’s plan. They mean that God is in total control, and the bad thing that’s just happened to you happened according to the will of God.

I don’t think we need this idea. It’s often used, and maybe it came about, in order to explain the cross. Some atonement theories rely on the idea that God knew, from the beginning of time, that Christ would have to die on the cross. But there are other atonement theories that state that the cross was never part of any plan that God came up with, but was the result of human will and human evil. I agree.

If we shift our idea of providence, or get rid of the idea of providence altogether, something wonderful might happen. We might find that we’re more open to miracles as they appear in our lives. We can allow them to be mysterious without having to slot them into a pre-existing intellectual framework. We can accept that God is constantly trying to do new things in the world, and in our lives, because there’s no script. God sees what is necessary in the moment and responds. When we’re suffering, that might mean simply being present to us, or filling us with the strength to reach out to others who might help us, or reassuring us that we’re forgiven when, in our pain, we act in ways that surprise us and that let us down. When we’re not suffering, but full of joy, we might look for the miraculous in our daily lives, in flowers appearing on trees in the sunshine, in the heavy sunlight that falls on us in summer, in the rim of ice on a puddle in winter. We might allow ourselves to understand that each passing moment is precious, even if it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with a pre-packaged divine plan. I’m advocating for us to stop looking for God’s cosmic plan, and start paying attention to God’s shifting order.

“Isn’t improv hard?” My wife asked me at breakfast, after I’d been waxing poetic about the 2015 Young Adult retreat, where my friends Barbara Allen and Bill Sabo led us in exploring the spirituality of improvisation.

“Not really,” I said, and then I thought about it. “I suppose it is hard, but in the way that yoga is hard, or powerful prayer is hard. You start with really simple things and build on them, to the point that after an hour, or in the case of the improv retreat, six hours, you’re doing and feeling things that you couldn’t right at the beginning.” I sipped my coffee and thought about how skillfully Bill and Barbara had done this, how they’d patiently built from nothing to the point where, at the end, people who had been shy and felt awkward at first were doing wonderful two person scenes. And I realized that they’d gotten us there by inviting us to be vulnerable, and creating a community of safety and mutual regard. How had they done this?

Mark Twain famously said that a joke is like a frog. You can dissect it, but first you have to kill it. So it’s with some trepidation that I choose to describe Barbara and Bill’s method and speculate on its meaning for Christian community. A two person scene usually starts with the improvisers asking for a setting or a relationship, or for some other prompt that will give them a context. In good improv fashion, I should give you the context of the retreat. We were at the Procter Center, right before Christmas. The sets of relationships were varied, or one might say hybrid. The Young Adult retreat started as a kind of reunion for Procter camp counsellors, but in recent years has expanded to include intentional communities, campus ministries, and any young adult who finds the theme intriguing and chooses to join us. So when we gathered on Friday night there were a lot of hugs and old friendships resumed, and a few clumps of people who live in community together but were strangers to everyone else.

Jane Gerdsen designed our opening worship, which involved candles and singing and prayers. Bill and Barbara said that it was the best introduction to an improv retreat they’d ever seen, so hooray for Jane! After we worshipped, Barbara and Bill began the work of knitting us together as a community by introducing us to the Zulu greeting, “I see you, you are here.” It was a call to recognizing one’s own presence in the room and inviting the other person to be fully present as well. Having planted this idea in our heads, Barbara introduced us to a game that, miraculously, got all forty of us to know each other’s names within the space of about twenty minutes. Then, in a huge circle, we played “Pass the Clap,” a famous improv game that consists of nothing but looking at the person next to you and trying to clap at exactly the same moment. The clap moved around the circle, all the others watching intently as each pair in turn tried to synchronize their clapping, looking into each other’s eyes, syncing themselves to each other. This, and a few other games, emphasized the deep need for attentiveness and awareness in improv work. Through these exercises, such work becomes contemplative, and participants are invited to live within the present moment without worrying about the past or planning for the future.

It was also an opportunity for Bill to teach us about discovery. There is an assumption that improv, and creative endeavor in general, is about invention – we prove how smart we are by inventing something new to do, think, or make. But improv posits that true creativity is based in discovery – finding out, through close attention, what the world is like, who another person is, what one’s own experience is all about. For Christians, who believe in God’s creation and gifts of grace, an attitude that’s open to discovery should be assumed. It isn’t, often, because our lives outside the church don’t reward it, and often our faith communities reflect the larger society’s emphasis on dominance and individualism. But what if we could assume that everything is a gift to us – each encounter, each observation, each emotion we feel, each environment we find ourselves in? Writing this at Christmas time, I can’t help but think of the nativity story, which is a narrative of discovery. No one says no to the miraculous truths that they’re discovering. Mary doesn’t say, “I can’t give birth to the savior of the world, because I didn’t think to do so all on my own,” the shepherds don’t say “angels can’t speak to us because we’re too unimportant,” the magi don’t say “a king can’t be hanging out in a stable.” All of them discover new truths about the world and God, and agree to that discovery.

We ended the evening by playing an amazing game called “three things.” The principle is simple. One person starts out as an object, animate or otherwise, a giraffe, for example. Another person gets up and says “I’m the giraffe’s keeper.” A third person gets up and says, “I’m the keeper’s secret desire to work with apes.” The audience then shouts out which of these three things should be kept to start the next scene with. “Keep the desire to work with apes!” That person stays while the other two sit down, and a new person gets up and says, “I’m a lonely ape who needs a friend,” and a third gets up and says “I’m a banana that’s hoping not to get eaten.” And so on. As we played this, we reached the point in the retreat when people really started laughing, when you could feel a sense of rising joy in the community. There was an understanding that any idea would do, that no one would be criticized for their choices, that supportive laughter was the norm.

The next morning, after Holy Communion, we returned to circle games, playing the scatologically named “Where Have My Fingers Been?” As we went around the circle, each person held up a finger as the person next to them did likewise, and initiated a brief scene based on a location prompt. Maybe someone would tell them “you’re in a zoo!” The first person would waggle a finger like it was a character and say, “I’m a giraffe.” The second would waggle a finger in response and say “I miss my zoo keeper.” The first person would complete the scene with one more line, “The apes have it lucky.” It seems easy on paper, but when the scene came around it was easy to freeze, trying to think of something clever or funny to say. In improv this is called “getting in your head.” It’s a response based in fear, in worry over acceptance, sometimes in a competitive desire to dominate others and prove yourself to be the best. Games like “Where Have My Fingers Been” are designed to get you out of your head, away from the worries over acceptance or criticism and purely invested in the moment you’re inhabiting. This is a very difficult thing to learn how to do, and the next exercises reenforced the lesson as we did more very brief scenes, initiating dialog and responding to the initiation.

In some ways, this process of remaining open to discovery even as we initiate ideas or respond to other people’s ideas is very like the concept of nepsis in the contemplative tradition. Nepsis can best be described as “the mind watching the mind.” It corresponds to Jesus’s statement in Mark 7:15 that “there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.” When I let my mind watch my mind, I become aware of all of the criticism, the competitiveness, the fears and anxieties that shape my thoughts on an almost moment to moment basis. It is those things that make it hard for me to be authentic in community, to open myself up and be truly vulnerable to others. One of the benefits of contemplative prayer is that it makes one aware of these thoughts, and then offers an invitation to let them go, to move beyond them and rest solely in God. Oddly, to me this is also one of the benefits of a game like “Where Have My Fingers Been?” It teaches us that moment to moment thoughts aren’t really that important, that they can be caught and released, and that there is always someone there to accept them without judgement.

And after practicing this a number of times, we found ourselves truly playing together, creating two person scenes of great joy and vitality. By Saturday afternoon, we had become a community, and the context had changed. We were no longer a reunion, or a conglomerate of different ministries and houses. We were a church. This became powerfully apparent at the very end of the retreat. Aaron Wright and Jane asked us to offer each other improv blessings. We broke into groups of three, and each person was blessed by the other two, prayed over, told what the others appreciated about them. I tear up just thinking about it. And I know, now, that true community comes into being when people let go of their internal editors, and even more importantly, their internal critics, when they don’t try to control the world but open themselves up to discovering it, when they find the freedom to play, and when they choose to bless the specificity of each other’s being. Community can’t be created, it can only be discovered.

I’m having trouble referring to God as “Lord” these days, so I’m borrowing from Mechthild of Magdeburg and calling God “the Love Beyond All Love” instead.  A nod to bridal mysticism, and a gesture away from theologies of dominance.  The text comes from the 96th Psalm.  Here are verses 1-9:

Sing to the LORD a new song; *
sing to the LORD, all the whole earth.2Sing to the LORD and bless his Name; *
proclaim the good news of his salvation from day to day.

Declare his glory among the nations *
and his wonders among all peoples.

For great is the LORD and greatly to be praised; *
he is more to be feared than all gods.

As for all the gods of the nations, they are but idols; *
but it is the LORD who made the heavens.

Oh, the majesty and magnificence of his presence! *
Oh, the power and the splendor of his sanctuary!

Ascribe to the LORD, you families of the peoples; *
ascribe to the LORD honor and power.

Ascribe to the LORD the honor due his Name; *
bring offerings and come into his courts.

Worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness; *
let the whole earth tremble before him.

A line from one of my favorite psalms, Psalm 30.  Here’s the full text of the psalm.

I will exalt you, O LORD,
because you have lifted me up *
and have not let my enemies triumph over me.

O LORD my God, I cried out to you, *
and you restored me to health.

You brought me up, O LORD, from the dead; *
you restored my life as I was going down to the grave.

Sing to the LORD, you servants of his; *
give thanks for the remembrance of his holiness.

For his wrath endures but the twinkling of an eye, *
his favor for a lifetime.

Weeping may spend the night, *
but joy comes in the morning.

While I felt secure, I said,
“I shall never be disturbed. *
You, LORD, with your favor, made me as strong as the mountains.”

Then you hid your face, *
and I was filled with fear.

I cried to you, O LORD; *
I pleaded with the Lord, saying,

“What profit is there in my blood, if I go down to the Pit? *
will the dust praise you or declare your faithfulness?

Hear, O LORD, and have mercy upon me; *
O LORD, be my helper.”

You have turned my wailing into dancing; *
you have put off my sack-cloth and clothed me with joy.

Therefore my heart sings to you without ceasing; *
O LORD my God, I will give you thanks for ever.