May I speak in the name of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
From the very beginning of the Gospel according to John: In the beginning was the Word.
Imagine something called ‘essence’.
It’s outside and beyond our existence. It’s made up of three persons in total dynamic relation to one another. We call it ‘Trinity’. We can also call it ‘God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit’. The Trinity dwells in forever, beyond time and space. The Trinity chose to create time, space, matter, shape, life, energy, consciousness. Everything we call existence. And the purpose of the Trinity was to be in relationship with humanity and creation in person. And when that person, Jesus, was rejected, killed, and came back from the dead, the Trinity never gave up on humanity. We received the Holy Spirit, who came to shape all people in the ways Jesus had offered.
The Trinity is an immense mystery, and at various stages of our lives, we might struggle with it, argue about it, wonder about it, or reflect on it. And it will always remain a mystery.
Mystery is not something that we can’t understand; it is something that we can endlessly understand. There is no point at which we can say, ‘I’ve got it.’ Because always and forever, mystery gets us! So all we can do is to circle[1] around it, and consider it with great humility because it is infinitely greater than us.
The ones who gave it the most thought were the very mystical Cappadocian Fathers of the church who lived in 4th century Easten Turkey. It took three centuries of reflection on the Gospels, some highly sophisticated thinking, and great courage, to come to what we eventually called ‘the Trinity’. The Cappadocian Fathers circled around the best metaphors they could find. And they said that whatever is going on in God is a flow, a radical relatedness, a perfect communion between Three, a circle dance of love.
They dared to call it a divine circle dance[2] and they used the Greek word perichoresis which gave us the word choreography.
God is the dance itself. We heard the words of Jesus in the Gospel of John: ‘All that belongs to the Father is mine. That is why I said the Spirit will receive from me what he will make known to you.’ These words address the relationship between Father, Son and Holy Spirit, as a constant stream, to and fro, gliding from the Father to the Son, to the Spirit, and back to the Father, in one timeless happening. A circular current of trinitarian love that continues night and day.[3]
Of course, we might struggle, today, with this three-in-one concept, but for early communities, this triadic pattern was not a problem at all. If we look at Paul’s letters, to the Romans or to the Thessalonians, we realise that this pattern was a well-established way of speaking of God. It was a lived experience of the Three.
Closer to us in time, we can think of the lived experience of the Trinity that developed into mission. I’m thinking of course of St Patrick’s prayer, known as ‘St Patrick’s Breastplate’:
I bind unto myself today
the strong name of the Trinity,
by invocation of the same,
the Three in One and One in Three.
It’s easy to imagine St Patrick, on arising, saying this prayer as he put on his tunic and bound it around himself.[4] He must have felt protected not only by his clothes but by the Trinity as an armour of the presence of God. That was the image he had of God, the strong name of the Trinity.
Franciscan friar Richard Rohr[5] argues that we have to break through our images and ideas about God to find out who God – and the Trinity – really is. He finds, for example, that many people are afraid of God, experience God as cold and absent, and even have a sense of God as someone who might hurt and betray them. These ideas about God reveal far more about our own human relationships than they do about the Trinity.
Also, over the years, many have pictured God – consciously or unconsciously – as a pyramid, with a male God at the top of the triangle and everything else beneath. A lot of Christian art, church design, and architecture reflects this pyramidal view of the world. But this pyramid or patriarchal logic does not apply at all to the dynamic Trinity. Trinitarian thinking is more spiral, circle, and flow than pyramid.
And the good news is, we are part of this Trinitarian flow. Remember the Rublev icon: it depicts three person in an open circle. There is room for a fourth one, and that’s each and every one of us.
The dance is an open circle, an open invitation. We hear this invitation in the words of Jesus: ‘The Spirit of truth’, he says, ‘will guide you’. Guided by the Spirit, we are reminded that we are part of the dance, like all of creation in fact, all of creation is invited in, because the purpose of the Trinity was to be in relationship with humanity. Our starting place as humans was always original goodness[6] and God’s ultimate intention was always salvation, the liberation God intended from the very beginning.
If there was one thing to take away today about the Trinity, I would say it’s this: when the world rejected and killed Jesus, the Trinity could have given up on the relationship with humanity. But that wasn’t the case. And today, we have the Spirit of God with us, as a source of guidance, of wisdom and of comfort. Such is the infinite outpouring of love of the Trinity for creation that draws us, again and again, into the divine dance.
The Trinity is a mystery that we can endlessly understand, in many different ways, and these ways will change over the course of our lives, and that’s a good thing. A dance flows, it’s never static.
But don’t take my word for it, or rather, take with the you the words of Malcom Guite: I’d like to leave with you this beautiful poem that he wrote three years ago:
Trinity Sunday
In the Beginning, not in time or space,
But in the quick before both space and time,
In Life, in Love, in co-inherent Grace,
In three in one and one in three, in rhyme,
In music, in the whole creation story,
In His own image, His imagination,
The Triune Poet makes us for His glory,
And makes us each the other’s inspiration.
He calls us out of darkness, chaos, chance,
to improvise a music of our own,
To sing the chord that calls us to the dance,
Three notes resounding from a single tone,
To sing the End in whom we all begin;
Our God beyond, beside us, and within.
Amen
M L-R
[1] Rohr, R., The Divine Dance, p. 27
[2] Rohr, p. 31
[3] Marechal, E., Tears of an Innocent God, in Rohr, p. 27
[4] Adam, D., The Path of Light, p. 20
[5] In CAC Daily Meditations received by e-mail
[6] Genesis 1:10-31