Every Christian has felt the tension, the ache of living in a world both redeemed and rebellious, luminous and fallen. Permixtum saeculum. We live between the Cross and the Kingdom. In our hearts, ideologies clammer to offer quick resolutions that deny the wounding of nature, the gratuity of grace, and the rights of God and His Church. We find ourselves adrift, not sure what move is actually true or right, and even if those can be united in our decisions right now. What if the key to living in that tension isn’t found in pre-written political agendas, but in the very heart of God made manifest in His faithful ones?
Perichoresis is the mutual indwelling of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; it’s the eternal dance of love that clarifies God’s life. Appreciating the mystery of God’s inmost life informs us about how He desires to work in His creation and communicate His life to us, His creatures (CCC 236). Each Person fully inhabits the others without confusion or collapse. Distinct yet united, they live entirely for one another. This is not abstract theology but the reality of the most fundamental mystery itself, offering an analogy for everything else most essential (and unique) to life itself: Christ’s incarnation, Mary’s maternity, the Church’s life, and our own mission. We need to enter into this mystery to realize the potential God has for us and our society. Inasmuch as God’s inner life illuminates our minds and shapes our prudence, we can sanctify the temporal order with our lives by participating in His.
Through perichoresis, we glimpse the mysteries of grace with a potent analogy. In Christ, divinity and humanity are wed, not by domination or dilution, but by communion. In Mary and the Church, divine love overflows into creation, binding heaven and earth in a shared maternity that gives birth to grace across generations. Mary’s fiat, “let it be to me according to your word,” is the Church’s heartbeat and ours. This fiat is the interior form of communio, the fundamental difference between how the Christian and the pagan act in the world. It is thus, in this fiat, that the reality of what enlivens and differentiates Christian society is found.
The logic of perichoresis runs through the entire cosmos once we grasp that all is redeemed as gift from Father, in the Son, by the Spirit, through the Church. This is the rhythm of grace in a world that perpetually attempts to resist it. Often, we prefer coercion or domination, reducing power to extremes because it is more familiar in a sin-wounded world, instead of witnessing how God’s mystery transcends our feeble senses and brings life out of those who are persecuted and buried in the ground as wheat. Perichoresis teaches us how to be present without absorbing the other, distinct without withdrawing from the other, to love without dominating the other. It gives us an analogy for a true union of persons that is desperately needed. Mission, then, is not conquest or expansion of the will to power but learning to move to the Trinitarian rhythm, a different drum than the solutions peddled in our favorite, and most inciting, podcasts. Like the leaven in the wheat, Christians are to indwell the world as God indwells creation: in love, patience, and self-giving communion.
We are in an age obsessed with winning. This tunnel vision on progress necessitates a radical alternative to correct our vision and attention. I propose a re rooting our our hearts, so filled with holy desire for legitimate change in our world, on the reality of the Trinity’s love. Not simply the abstract theological terms that describe the immanent Trinity (God in Himself), but understanding God’s immanence through the mode of his economic revelation (that is, the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ). It is not an unreasonable proposal, for God’s innermost life is perfectly revealed in Jesus’ paschal mystery. As such, everyone, even the smallest of children, can be transformed and live differently. God’s mysteries are, what Bishop Barron calls, “on the far side of reason.” Yet they are on the side of reason. As we contemplate them, we will be truly changed by them. If we truly believe in the Creed, we must let our faith shape how we build the world, including our societies. Paragraph 234 of the Catechism teaches,
The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is the central mystery of Christian faith and life… It is therefore the source of all the other mysteries of faith… It is the most fundamental and essential teaching in the ‘hierarchy of the truths of faith’. The whole history of salvation is identical with the history of the way and the means by which the one true God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, reveals himself to men ‘and reconciles and unites with himself those who turn away from sin.’
The Church’s task is not to escape the world but to let the dance of the Trinity move through it, sanctifying the ordinary until it becomes luminous again at the return of Christ the King. We must only do what we see our Father doing (John 5:19). This requires that our vision be shaped by the paschal mystery. As our minds are renewed in Christ’s, so too will our sight. Then we will see clearly and build the world from Him. I mean something like J.R.R. Tolkien’s concept of sub-creation, we need to let the little worlds in which we occupy (first in our own heads!), our spheres of influence, bring forth the restoration of Trinitarian love. We are building a world within one already created and bought with a price. Our minds must be storehouses of the truths of salvation history. Only these truths will ultimately be sure guides as we deliberate matters of prudence, especially politics. No amount of worldly wisdom can compare.
This is why the Cristeros in Mexico of 1926-9, in all their complexity, are a true witness of a Catholic political spirit that needs to be nurtured. They fought and resisted the tyrannical laws out of natural love for Mexico and would not surrender the gifts of the Church. Their motto was Long live Christ the King and Holy Mary of Guadalupe! They peacefully protested, then, upon need, strategically led a counterrevolution, not simply for owning their buildings, but primarily for receiving and ensuring the sacramental life itself. They knew that Catholicism elevates and infuses society; it does not destroy it. Before the revolution usurped the great nation of Mexico, the entire people had been thoroughly infused with Catholicism, largely due to the maternal intervention of Our Lady. They understood that everything true, good, and beautiful is lifted up in Jesus Christ. They saw it in their land, in their history, in their brothers, sisters, and towns.
Sofia Cavalleti wrote about the particularly Christian approach to being in history in History of the Kingdom of God,
We are familiar with many histories connected to the rise and fall of many peoples, which are limited in time and confined to the boundaries of specific countries. In contrast to these histories, the history of salvation is the history of all peoples and of each person. Its origin stems from the creation of the world. Indeed, there was always present in the mind of God a plan that would unfold in time. Through its realization, people would come to the fullness of life. Differing from the histories of the peoples, which have a beginning, arrive at a point of greatest glory, and then inevitably decline and are replaced by other peoples and civilizations, sacred history follows a progressive development. From creation it is marked by stages that are always ascending toward redemption, in which the divine world and the human world are united in a human being, Jesus of Nazareth.
Whatever becomes of America, we ought not to lose the plot amidst wars, rumors of wars, and the malaise of sin. Jesus is our history. He is our future. We must place our hearts in the Sacred Heart, keep our hands within Mary’s, and let the art of the possible be subordinate to the seemingly impossible reality of Trinitarian love poured out in history. We must let our actions become shaped by Her fiat.
In this article, we explored the divine pattern of abundant life as a true source of renewal for our minds. In the next article, we will consider the human stage where this pattern is performed or rejected: the mixed world experienced between the City of God and the City of Man.
