Trinity

Today is Trinity Sunday.  It's a cliche in the American churches that observe this Sunday that this is the only feast day devoted to a doctrine rather than a person.  This shows us what a bad job the churches have done in educating their people, including their clergy!

It's true, there's a lot of ink spilled over the Trinity.  It's true that it became a tenet of faith in a way different from believing in the historical reality of Jesus, or relating to God the Creator.  But at its heart, the Trinity is no less about "people" or "history" or "experience" than is any other aspect of our faith.  In the Trinity we experience three persons, three faces of God.  We encounter the love of God, not only as it relates to us but as it forms the very being of God.

This may be the problem.  We seem to be onlookers in discussion of the Trinity.  It's all about God, and not about us!  Or so it seems.  Except that God's love for the world animates God to come to us, messed up as we are.  Except that God's love lives among us and within us, healing and renewing us daily.  It is all about God.  And it's about God's relationship to us.

But let's say it is about God in Godself.  I don't know about you, but I can be curious about the being of a person or thing quite separately from how they impact me.  Scientists and inquirers of all sorts demonstrate that, as do those who serve others.  So why not be curious about God's inner dynamics?  Yes, it's abstract and hard to get a handle on, but so are many things worth thinking about - perhaps most things worth thinking about.

The problem isn't that the Trinity is a doctrine.  The problem is that we have learned about it only as a doctrine.  As some friends say, we eat the menu and wonder why the meal doesn't taste good.  The doctrine is only the menu.  To taste God's goodness, we need to move into and beyond doctrine.  Lectio divina is one way.  Get curious.  Why these texts today?  What can you find, beyond the words "Father," "Son," "Spirit"?  Where do you hear love?

I will be in church.  I'll bind myself to the Trinity, the reality and archetype of dynamic relationship.  I'll sing the hymns and pray the prayers, and listen for the love of God.  May you do likewise.

Happy Trinity Sunday!