The Dance of The Trinity

 

Trinity Sunday, falling this week, is one of those when preachers, unadvisedly, attempt to do the impossible and explain God as one in three and three in one.

Perhaps, because lots of our faith is in poetry rather than prose, a wiser move is to describe the idea of Trinity rather than quantify it.  After all any definition of God always comes up short.

Our Jewish friends have always pictured God as both a great deity and a personal companion.  This is the God who both made the universe and settles upon kings, priests and prophets to empower them.  Theologians have two big words for that understanding calling God both transcendent and imminent.

Us Christians add yet another layer to that mystery by including Jesus.  Put in that last piece of the jigsaw and we end up with Trinity; Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Conscious that I’m now about to do the very thing I counselled against just a moment ago, here are three descriptions of God for this Trinity season.

I’m grateful for the Breath of Creation and the touch of God’s hand in our planet’s DNA.  Nature, in both its magnificence and delicacy is comforting and overwhelming at the same time.  After all, during Lockdown many of us fell in love with our gardens again!  Although the edges are blurry and the message is complex, nature seems to teach us about God.

And there is Living Truth.  I’m a big fan of the stories of Jesus; not only the ones he told but also the narrative he lived.  This is grounded truth and it is the genius of the Gospel that God came and lived among us in a way we could understand, appreciate and, in the best sense of the word, imitate.

So, last but never least, there is the Power of Love, that contemporary and everyday activity of love when life is infused by the divine Spirit, found in us all.

Wherever and whenever love touches our lives, God is near.

Describing God is as frustrating as a child thinking they could ever capture the ocean in a sand castle’s moat!  It keeps running away and escaping.

Yet it’s good that we don’t give up because in seeking to get to grips with The Trinity there is just the possibility that its mystery will both amaze and inspire us that little bit more.

And, perhaps, it wasn’t for nothing that in the Jewish Scriptures God chooses to announce himself with an economy of words in the tantalisingly ambiguous: I am who I am.

Happy Trinity!