Richard Rohr, The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation (New Kensington, PA: Whitaker House) 2016.

Richard Rohr is a popular author, speaker, retreat leader and spiritual guide, who brings his invitation to deeper thinking to Roman Catholic and Protestant seekers alike. I've listened to recordings of his lectures and read some of his materials before. The Divine Dance is an invitation to many believers to think differently about the nature of God. I have to admit that I was already drawn to a theology that is similar to Rohr's and that reading the book as Trinity Sunday approached, I found many nuggets that probably showed up in some of my preaching.

When we think of God as individual, we are limited by all sorts of things that appear, on the surface, to be contradictions. How can God be the Creator and also be Jesus in Jesus' human form? How does the Holy Spirit fit into all of this? Have our images of God as an old man who presides over heaven like the patriarch of a dying clan render an image of God that is irrelevant in our time? How much of these old notions of God make God unbelievable to modern thinkers?

Rohr invites seekers to think of God primarily in terms of relationship. God as community, as friendship, as dance is a different image of the divine nature than is typically cited by modern thinkers who claim that they do not believe in God. As has often been said, "The god in which you do not believe is a god in which I also do not believe. The God in which I believe seems to be absent from your criticisms and from your thinking."

This is an easy book to read and an open invitation to think differently about the nature of God and how God participates in human life.