I’m not a religious person, but sometimes, I like to think of the trinity as a metaphor to understand perspectives—the father/mother, son/daughter, and the Holy Spirit—all contexts, all ways of getting along with ourselves and other people—and a way to juggle these different contexts at the same time: to see ourselves as the children we’ve been; to see ourselves as parents, parenting our children as well as our younger selves; and to also see ourselves as a container of Being, that’s part of our person but also capable of being beyond our person, by rising up to that top floor of things where we can access that heavenly perspective, that place where we can see so clearly that life on the ground floor—being triggered and angry and judgmental, passionate and aspiring—are simply the ingredients of the surviving world, where everyone’s got a different mouth and trying at the same time to hunt for the sustenance to feed it.
From up on that top floor we can see that really, everyone is doing the very best we can do with our particular relationship with the sustenance we have access to, and with the sustenance we so badly need and long for but don't have access to—and this perspective can give us a bit of compassion for what we're all going through, and a bit of the realization that maybe, we can make things a little more beautiful and a little more meaningful for ourselves and others, if we are only willing to bring down some of that heavenly perspective to the ground floor of life.
Maybe when Jesus was nailed to that cross, to that infamous trinity, he looked down and realized the enormity of Thy Will Be Done, because he was seeing things, literally had no choice but to see things, from that heavenly perspective. And being that he had no choice, his clarity was ignited—knowing finally, and with utmost certainty, that the striving for fulfillments that feed us down there on the ground floor are one thing, but the fulfillment of aligning one’s purpose with that heavenly perspective feeds the soul immortal.
Maybe he realized that this top floor perspective, and his journey that led to being literally crucified there by people who really didn’t know what they were doing, ignited that awesome realization that this journey was his path, his scripture. That from this heavenly perspective, there was no reason to feel crucified in the murderous sense, but to almost thank all those folks for giving him that inadvertent opportunity to learn what he ultimately needed to learn. Which was then followed by that divine urgency to return to the ground floor and share with these others what he so desperately needed them to know—that the world is not crucifying you—it’s just doing what it’s doing. And if you come up here, where I was, and see things from my perspective, you can find some relief and some compassion and some clarity, and then bring a bit back down with you so you too, can share it with those who don't yet understand.
In my own life when I’m on the ground floor and when I don’t remember that the top floor perspective even exists, it feels like I’m being crucified by my circumstances, and it feels like I have no ability to be flexible to see circumstances from any higher place. In fact, I only want to escape.
But if I can just stay put in my difficult circumstances; keep myself attached to them by my own will, I will remember that there is another way to see things. That the higher perspective, when I’m aligned with it, will always remind me that I’m on my path. And even though there's tremendous suffering in the world, caused both by my own hand and by the hand of others, that all of our paths are our personal scripture. And that the story of our scripture is not merely to be comfortable, but to expand our perspectives, even as it hurts to do so, and then, to return back to the ground floor to share what we’ve learned up there with the people in our lives, and share it through our hearts, before we ultimately return to that most holy of contexts.
-JLK
