As a kid my family belonged to St. Patrick’s parish and I attended the parish school for eight years. As students, of course, we were immersed in the lore and legends surrounding our Irish patron saint. And probably like most of you, our first exposure to the Trinity came in the form of a shamrock. I vaguely remember the nuns’ using the shamrock when we came to that section of the catechism, but mostly I remember shamrocks everywhere in our school throughout the month of March, pinning them on our uniforms, drawing them in art class, taking them home to show our parents. We really got into celebrating the feast of St. Patrick! His symbol represented our school identity, and the Trinity didn’t even enter our minds. Everyone, including the nuns I think, just basically let it go.
And that’s mostly what happened from the end of the 4th Century until recently when theologians began re-visioning the foundational beliefs of our faith to bring them in line with new language and insights from philosophy, science, psychology and various other areas of research. Back in 325, when the Council of Nicaea articulated its understanding of who Jesus was bishops depended on the philosophical language of their time. They also wanted to debunk the Arian position that Jesus, as Son of God, was not equal to God the Father. The arguments were fierce including street brawls between ordinary people, not unlike what is happening between political factions in cities across our own country today. Even after the Council formulated the Nicene Creed the matter wasn’t really settled. It wasn’t until the end of the 4th Century that the doctrine of the Trinity essentially reached its present form. And though belief in a Trinitarian God is accepted across denominations, everything about it, including its history, is so confusing people tend to ignore it, discount it, refuse to believe it or simply call it a ‘mystery’ and let it go.
In the last few decades, though, a change has been taking place. I mentioned in this month’s newsletter that Catherine Mowry LaCugna, a former Theology professor at Notre Dame, wrote a book called “God For Us: the Trinity and Christian Life.” In it she argues that this doctrine is extremely practical and has “far reaching consequences for Christian life” if we allow ourselves to look at it differently. She calls it a “theology of relationship.” LaCugna was passionate about the Trinitarian image of God, seeing its potential to transform how we see ourselves and our world intricately woven into God’s own creatively diverse and singularly unified life. Sadly, she died of cancer at the age of 44.
What we know of God from the Hebrew Scriptures, from Jesus’ life and teachings, from the experience of mystics recorded throughout time and across cultures, is that God is about relationship. A Trinitarian image of God is an image of God in Love as Persons, forever connected to Creation in all its variety and clearly wanting an intimate relationship with each and every one of us. We need a God who deeply and unconditionally loves us in order to feel secure enough to love each other and all creation. We need a God who is intimately connected with us yet is as vast as the Cosmos itself.
We need a God who is the life-force animating all that is to show us, over and over, that everything is sacred, that everything, every creature, every blade of grass and every drop of water is Love-made-tangible-and-visible because the Creator, being Love, can create nothing that isn’t part of itself. We need a God who pulses compassion through all of Creation so every one of us feels the pain of others, the pain of the world itself, and is moved to heal that pain as a natural response from one Beloved being to another. We need a God who walks with us through the fires and raging storms, who cries with us, suffers with us, a God who is as close to us as our own breath, never letting us out of sight for even a nano-second. We desperately need a God who experiences the depths of our suffering, our anxiety and despair, who knows first hand what it’s like to feel utterly abandoned and alone as Jesus did on the cross. We need a God who cares enough to count the hairs on our heads, call us each by name, and love us so much that all communication is designed to touch us, heal us, love us into knowing that what we are is Love-learning-to-know-LOVE. At the same time we need a God who is so far beyond anything we can imagine or understand that God mystifies even our astrophysicists as they face a rapidly expanding and utterly mind-blowing universe. We need a Creator God that at least matches what scientists are only beginning to discover about worlds that are light years away.
The shamrock is so inadequate as a symbol of such an all-embracing, relationally dynamic, intimately personal and awe-inspiringly cosmic Love Being we simply call “God.” And it is incredibly inadequate in helping us see that we are held firmly in that love-field of Divine Community we Christians know as the One and only God, the cradle of Love within which everything exists.
Belief in a Trinitarian God underscores absolute inclusivity of everything and everyone. It highlights the requirement that Christians not only accept but celebrate diversity at every level and look for common threads to bring communities together while respecting and maintaining differences. Trinitarian theology upholds respect for the earth and its resources and directs us to honor, protect, preserve and treat as sacred all our relations following the lead of our wise indigenous ancestors across the planet. A Trinitarian image of God tells us we all belong. Everyone and everything is included, beloved. As Christians we are called to build and foster the Beloved Community, which is another way of saying “the reign of God on earth.”
We don’t know what it will take to heal divisions of such magnitude that we see in the world today. We are being called out of the safety of commonly shared but narrowly defined attitudes, beliefs and viewpoints by the Spirit of Life, the Compassion of God and the Creative Love Force within us all. The Trinitarian God lives in us and in the world. God is working to dissolve those barriers and urging us to cooperate, to open up to possibility, to trust and give ourselves over to this dying/rising process that is the transformative and life-giving process of our time. It is frightening. It is painful. But we can do this. We aren’t alone. God as Trinity is here, speaking to us, using every method possible to let us know all of this, all of it, is held in the heart of love. So we pick up our courage and hand over our lives, following the direction and voice of an ever-present, all-inclusive and passionately loving God.
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