Editorial: The Trinity and Me

I keep waiting to meet the Trinitarian God.

Of course, part of the point of the Trinity might be to explain why this won't happen. Scripture progresses fairly neatly from Father to Son to Paraclete, at least in terms of encounters between the human and divine, ie one can't come until the other goes, one sends the other.

But still, since my logic has consistently, for the better part of sixteen years, failed at the feet of the Trinity to comprehend it/them, and since Scripture is not exactly systematic in elucidating the point, and since the tradition I grew up with repeated the doctrine as though that repitition were, in fact, an explanation, I consider myself at pretty loose ends in regards to God in Three Persons.

Let alone my problems, due to personal history, with the paternalistic language of the proposition. (Was Jesus just a son, like me, who couldn't overcome? "Father take this cup from me? No, okay, okay, I'll go, I submit! Wait, why did you leave? Why, Dad? Why?" )

So by my count, that leaves mystic, extra-lingual experience as the last valid route for confronting the reality I intellectually accept.

So I wish it would happen.

Of course, it may have. I mean, I've experienced God, briefly, as a lake of love, a field of invitation, and a storm of mystery. Is that a Trinity? Do I get to write a song about it? Can I get other people to sing? To agree?

Perhaps. Sociologically, the development of the Trinity may mark nothing more than an evolution in our understanding of God. Certainly, God cannot change. If God is Trinitarian, then God would have to always already have been Three. What changes is our relationship.

And through the history of Israel, we can certainly see developments. God is variously the God of creation, the God of daily protection and providential care, the God of history, the God of apocalypse, and the God of absense and silence. From all of these modes, Three Persons may actually be something of a graceful intellectual minimum.

This is not to say that one God or one Person could not be all of these things. It is to say that, once again, infinity makes confusion likely. Love may well be so enormously transcendent in its immanence that to begin to internalize it we might need to seperately contemplate, say, Formative Will, and Redemptive Grace, and Abiding Presence, while realizing that these things are all, in fact, one love.

Hey, is that another Trinity? I'm on a roll!

And it is to say that the Trinity may work best not as doctrine (as in the West) but as icon (as in the East). Not as the end of thought, but as its beginning. The idea of Trinity is itself fascinating. By logic we say that is impossible that three can be one, but our hearts know things our minds do not, our rational minds combat our emotive selves, and our bodies physically enhance our feelings even as they shape our mental self-image.

We must be all of these things, but can we be any one of them? Or are we the pattern of relationship between them?

What is the relationship between identity and community, self and other? Is identity solely the function of the self being identical to itself, or do selves develop only in relation to one another?

Certainly we are more ourselves when we are with others than we are by ourselves. Is the Son then more the Son for the existence of the Father, and the Father more the Father for the existence of the Son, and on, and on, forever?

If so, What does it mean to be a father, and to be a son- why does this image predominate? Do those concepts mean the same things I have heard in so many sermons, or did they resonate quite differently in the mind of Christ? And how does Spirit relate to both of them?

I certainly do not know, but I would like to.

May the God of Overwhelming Wind, the God of Everlasting Water, and the God of Desiring Flame all be with you.