This past Sunday was the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity. Before we get too far removed from it, I’d like to offer a few reflections on this central mystery of our faith.
When it comes to the Trinitarian nature of God, some Christians grew up with little or no mention of it. The Tri-unity of the Divine was just assumed: Father, Son, and Spirit. Others grew up hearing about the Trinity but were headed off at the pass with conversation stoppers like “You don’t have to understand it. Just believe it.” Or “Don’t question it. Believe it.” This often made it appear as if the adults didn’t understand it either or that the church had something to hide. Many of us grew up associating the Trinity with quaint symbols like the three-leaf clover or violet. Still others of us were given wooden explanations of the three-in-one nature of the Divine that have resulted in immature, literal, distorted, and damaging understandings of who God is. This is perhaps best captured by the pithy statement of Sister Sandra Schneiders, professor emerita in the Jesuit School of Theology at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. Schneiders famously exposed the sad and troubling truth that many people who call themselves Christians today still think of God as “Two men and a bird.”
It is important, and I think liberating, to realize that the truth of something is not dependent upon us being able to explain it or supply empirical evidence for it. I believe it was the bright and much beloved Irish philosopher-theologian John O’Donohue who wrote of a friend who said of his wife, “I’ve been married to her for forty years and I know her less today than I did at the beginning. But I love her more.” Such is the truth of human love where we grow in our awareness of the sheer mystery of the other and where the mystery of the other calls forth deeper love from us who also are fathomless mysteries. Here the husband’s admission is not an indication of stupidity or gullibility, but rather a sign of awe and reverence before the incomprehensible surprise, beauty, and mystery of his life partner. He comes to know and experience the unknowable nature of his wife in and through a contemplative knowledge born in love.
Could we not say the same thing of our relationship with and knowledge of this exquisitely enigmatic and ever-revealing universe in which we live? And is it not telling, as the scientists know so well, that the more we come to know of the universe, the more we realize how little we know of it, that new discoveries and more knowledge, as the mystics know so well, do not lead to less mystery or a dead end but rather become a doorway into more mystery and new life? If this is true of our relationship with other persons and with the universe, why not with the Divine as well?
Theology, like human intimacy and enchanted kinship with the universe, is knowledge born of love. As faith seeking understanding, it is more artistic than mechanical, more contemplative than empirical. Although theology includes and is not adverse to intellectual reasoning or rigor, there is a sense that the truths toward which it points and the spirituality which it gives birth to are necessarily articulated and best accessed in and through story, symbol, the unconscious, movement, dance, participative ritual action, meal sharing, poetry, dreams, the active imagination, song, silence, contemplation, nature, and relationship. The fact that we cannot capture the essence of our spouse, best friend, the resplendent earth, ourselves, or the Trinity with empirical data printed out nice and neat on a spreadsheet, does not invalidate its reality.
Although the word mystery can be misused, to use it in reference to the Trinity is not a convenient dodge from empiricism or a synonym for the absence of meaning but rather an allusion to the superfluous meanings inherent and hidden in a given reality. The fact that the husband of forty years is married to a mystery does not mean his spouse does not exist, only that as a mystery who images God there will always and necessarily be an ineffable quality to her as there is to the husband, and as there is to each of us. Whether present in the human other, the universe, ourselves, or the Trinity, mystery is like a deep, polysemous cave that can only be “known” by entering more deeply into it by way of love.
We must remember that it is difficult to speak of any mystery since the reach of words is never enough and even the best image, like a poignant and evocative metaphor, always works and doesn’t work. This is true whatever the mystery. It is always a matter of best, good, and least effective.
My favorite term or image of the Trinity is one I have long used and adapted from a term coined by Josiah Royce and later made famous and reworked by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 1960’s, namely, The Beloved Community. In Dr. King’s usage, the term The Beloved Community was meant to point toward the fullest, truest, and most noble expression of human relationship.[i]
Moving from the human to the universe and from the universe back to its Source, I think we can retrieve and rework an even richer and fuller meaning of this term by understanding God as the one, true, holy, and primordial Beloved Community from which all life is patterned and flows. God is a Who, not a what – and the image of the Divine as the original Beloved Community not only emphasizes the relational nature of the Divine but also stresses that the essence, desire, and action of that archetypal relation is the ongoing exchange of life and love. Enlivening relationship and love are two ways of talking about the same reality and each is not only indigenous to Who God is, but also why and how God acts. The attentive presence and mutual reverence, the giving and receiving, the back-and-forthness and the interpenetration of enlivening love within a holy communion– what the tradition has called “the three persons of the Blessed Trinity”– is offered to that which is not-God, that is, to the universe, and the earth, and humankind.
Although Christians generally have a sense for the relational nature of God in connection to creation and have come to see Jesus as the embodiment of the self-disclosive and relational love of God toward humankind, far fewer have considered or heard about the immanent Trinity (that is, God within Godself). Although it took more than a few centuries and many councils and controversies to work this out, the early Christians’ interpretation of the revelation in and through creation, scripture, accounts of Jesus’ relationship to God (Abba), his life, teaching, and promise to send his Paraclete after his death, and the wisdom garnered from the lived experience of the faith community resulted in an understanding of the threeness-in-oneness of God.
The early church arrived at an understanding of God as being three “persons” (hypostases) in one God; one in substance (homoousios), yet each distinct; each distinct, yet interdependent. This means that God is not a dense, static object or a distant, cold immovable subject. Rather God is a dynamic community of “participants” mutually present, enlivening, responsive, and interdependent.
During our lifetime, at least in scholarly circles, there has been a renaissance of attention and interest in the doctrine of the Trinity perhaps best seen in Catherine Mowry LaCugna’s landmark work God For Us: The Trinity and Christian Life published in 1993. It is beyond the purpose of this reflection to give a thorough account of LaCugna’s text. Suffice it to say that among the contributions her renewed view and alternative understanding of the Trinity offer us is the retrieval of the communal, egalitarian, vivifying nature of God, and the practical implications it suggests for Christian living. This was a radical departure from a doctrine of the Church that eventually became little more than an esoteric plaything of the theologically elite and seemed either wholly baffling, irrelevant, or impractical to the lives of individual persons and the faith community.
Much of the difficulty is understandable. All language about God is necessarily metaphorical, as mentioned above. There are no dimensions to the Divine, no accurate measurements to be taken. There is no verifiable inner or outer to the Divine. In its attempt to explain the nature of God as Trinity, the early church Fathers resorted to Greek words that over time came to mean something other than what the early church originally was trying to convey. The best example here is the Greek word hypostasis. Hypostasis, which literally means “to stand under,” referred to the foundational or essential underlying substance of a reality that made it uniquely what or who it was. Hypostasis referred not merely to attributes or aspects of a thing or person, but rather to its core, inviolable truth and essential principle. This word for the essential principle of a thing was translated as “person,” as in “the first or second or third person of the Trinity.” This kind of language—first person, second person, third person came to suggest a hierarchy within God, a sort of three-tiered God. Over time the shift in meaning of the word “person” from its Greek connotation especially as understood by Aristotle and then borrowed by the early church Fathers is, in my opinion, part of the reason why people came to literalize words like “Father,” and why eventually we arrived at Schneiders warning that God is not three guys and a bird. The original language was trying to identify distinctiveness or uniqueness while also emphasizing interdependence between and unity among the hypostases and was their way of talking about the relational, interbeing of God offered to and made available to the world.
What Christians have believed, experienced, and tried to articulate since their earliest days is that God’s relationship to the cosmos and to humankind corresponds to the very aliveness “within” Godself. The immanent Trinity points to who God is, why God is, and how God is, and is expressed outwardly as sheer gift to the human and other-than-human world. The relationship between the three-in-one of the Trinity is characterized by mutual presence, generosity, reciprocity, participation, creativity, and loving concern between the three hypostases.
To call God Trinity is to say God is the Exchange of Life and Love that always was, is, and will be happening within Godself and that is graciously, intentionally, and extravagantly shared with all of creation and with us. To be human is to be extended the opportunity to participate in the interplay of the Divine, to join in the liturgy of life that is an outward expression of who God is. As the graced beneficiaries of this immanent interaction of love turned toward the not-God– toward the universe and all its human and other-than-human creatures– we are not only invited into communion with God but are given the impetus, honor, and responsibility to form relationships and create communities that reflect the “interbeing” of God who is the primordial community. To the extent that the sacred community of the earth and all its creatures and life forms do this, they become compelling sacraments of Divine love, visible expressions of the mutually enhancing generosity, hospitality, inclusiveness, and loving care that reside within God.
It is worth noting here that discoveries of scientists during our lifetime, and the cosmogony and cosmology of the New Universe Story as presented by the late Passionist priest Thomas Berry, mathematical cosmologist Brian Swimme, Franciscan sister Ilia Delio, and many others, describes a universe and earth community that intricately reflect, embody, and allude to the Trinitarian dynamism of God. The universe is the incarnation of Divine aliveness, the visible unfolding, interaction, communion, and flowering of the triunity of the Divine in the natural world.
Berry identifies the three universal laws that are present, operative, and true in all levels of reality as differentiation, subjectivity, and communion. Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grimm write of their friend and mentor:
Berry brings this faith experience into the ecological context by articulating the Trinitarian oneness of Father as Principle of differentiation, Son as Word of inner articulation, and Spirit as bonding force in which the universe coheres.[ii]
This is a new way of talking about what Greek philosophical language strained to convey about the integral relationship between creation, redemption, and inspiration as well as when it described the Divine as “three persons in one God.” By differentiation Berry means the utter uniqueness and distinctiveness of each thing and everything in creation. Subjectivity refers to the consciousness or numinous interior quality in each component of reality. Communion refers to the ability and inclination for relationship with the other made possible in and through differentiation and subjectivity.[iii]
What is true for the Trinity is true for the universe and what is true for the universe is true for human beings. The relational nature of human engagement, friendship, and love are the internationalization of the laws of differentiation, subjectivity, and communion embedded and animated in the universe which reflects the essence and action, the interbeing and incarnation of its Source who is The Beloved Community we too casually call God.
It is due to understanding God as the exchange of life and love, as the aliveness of life, as The Beloved Community into which we are invited to participate and belong that over the years my own theology and spirituality have become more consciously Trinitarian.
It is also due to the fact that the more we learn about the cosmos and the earth, the more we see reflected in them the Trinitarian presence, interdependence, and inclination toward communion of the Divine so that it is not only in God but in and through creation which comes from God that we live and move and have our being.
I find the mystery revealed and concealed in the triune nature of the Divine to be humbling, evocative, challenging, and hopeful. I see how reimagining Trinity as a dynamic community of life and love has the capacity to point spouses, couples, parents, children, friends, colleagues, classmates, neighbors, strangers, and communities of faith toward an incarnated ethic of relationship that is life-giving and healing for one another and the earth.
The same recognition of the precious distinctiveness of each thing, the interrelationship and mutual enhancement of all creatures– human and other-than-human– and the capacity and yearning for creativity and communion are true in human persons’ kinship with the earth.
The Trinity is the original Beloved Community, the Source, prototype, and Spirit present in, animating, and uniting the entire universe, the sacred earth, and each and all persons in the human community. In the end as in the beginning, the question is not so much do we believe in the Trinity or can we conceive of the Trinity, but rather are we ready, willing, and enthused about participating in and incarnating God’s exchange of life and love?
[i] SEE http://www.thekingcenter.org/king-philosophy. King refashioned Royce’s term to refer not to a pollyannaish view of the peaceable kingdom but rather as an accomplishable way the citizens of the world could be in relationship with one another. In the Beloved Community human decency, reverence for the other, inclusion, mutual respect and commitment to nonviolence and peaceful resolution of conflict would counteract and replace the forces that make poverty, hunger, homelessness, prejudice, racism, violence, and war commonplace if not acceptable.
[ii] Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grimm, Thomas Berry: The Selected Writings on the Earth Community.
[iii] SEE http://www.mirrorofnature.org/Swimme%20Berry%20Awd.htm