The doctrine of the Trinity forms the foundation of Christian faith. At the core of Coakley’s perspective on prayer, in correlation with it, is a belief that God is experienced in devotion and is known to be an ineluctable triune being. She believes that contemplative devotion offers an open matrix for reflection on it (Trinity, n.d.). She flattened all types of hierarchical creeds of the Father, Son, and Spirit.
In her thinking, the special function of the Holy Spirit is a kind of struggle for the disinterestedness of the Holy Spirit. According to her, the uninterested in the Spirit can reaffirm patriarchal types of the Church, permitting a hierarchical Church that abuses or ignores women, and this harms what God is (Coakley, 2013). It requires both bodily transformation and practice, as well as social and individual transformation.
Furthermore, contemplation is a form of non-mastery, in which she notes that it entails significant risk, implying that a person may lose repressive control over others. All human authority that seeks to marginalize others can be stripped away. When an individual contemplates, at the same time, every need to manage the folk is removed and invited to kneel before the Trinity’s mystery (McGrath, 2018). However, at the same time, this can amount to rearranging and purifying desires, hence, allowing control to take the right direction.
During contemplation, the Spirit takes folk beyond ‘worthless human reasoning’ into the world of unspoken mystery (2 Corinthians 12), in which “spiritual devotion’ arises in the heart. In the intercession, there is a readiness to display permission for the Spirit to usher people into realms beyond their usual bounds. The encounter with the Spirit in contemplation guides one to accept and experience “reflexivity in the divine” (Coakley, 2013, 56). It is the time of non-stop exit and return of God’s desire. Contemplation plays a critical role in approaching it, as human desires are purified in the desires of God.
References
Coakley, S. 2013. God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay on the Trinity. New York: Cambridge University Press.
McGrath, A. E. (2018). Theology: The Basics (4th ed.). John Wiley & Son, Inc.
Trinity. (n.d.). Screenpal.com.