A Grittier Trinity

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Belief in the Trinity can be perilous to religious complacency. Most people are intimidated by how complicated the talk of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit seems. But I’m more struck by how the conviction can be a stomach punch to spiritual ease and shallowness.

This ancient way to talk of God is not some merely philosophical enterprise, not when at the heart of the Trinity’s life appear drama, even dereliction and desperation. For the Incarnation of Jesus, especially, majors on a story full of dirt, salt, grit, and bloodied sorrows.

Because of Jesus in the picture, it is in the Trinity where things get grittier--in its communion of persons next to a glimpse of Christ’s forsakenness. For the self-emptying of Jesus, his not “shunning the virgin’s womb,” did not exempt him from the severing of relations that is part of dying.

The poet Jane Kenyon captured some of this pathos when she talked about where help for humankind is found:

The God of curved space, the dry

God, is not going to help us, but the son

whose blood spattered

the hem of his mother’s robe.

Jesus’s gut-churning agony and squeezed-out, stolen breath reduced his friends (and what about his mother?) to stunned, reeling sorrow. This is why I say the Trinity is no sleepy doctrine. One theologian argues that all our conversations about God must now be done in earshot of the dying Jesus, for the horrors of human life and limitations hover over the unfolding account.

But only for a time. In light of the Cross’s trauma, the intimacy of Father and Son now takes on new depth. The pangs of rejection and hardship become not a sign of finality and erasure, but self-rending love, even in the face of death. 

For by the light of this wrenching portrait, suffering is not a problem to be solved, but rather becomes revealed, astonishingly, to name for us an aspect of God’s very being. To love is to suffer, and if God loves, God must ache for the world he made that is broken. God will yearn for his forlorn, distanced children. And bring them along.

The resurrection, of course, has much to add to this picture, and the story gets even more gripping for such a staggering reversal. Seeming God-forsakenness loses its estranging power as Christ’s risen life proves more powerful than we might have thought.

An insight like this has been pointing me to how the Trinity becomes a story of astonishing grace. For all the sometime trauma of our lives, with their setbacks, with the pandemic’s hollowing lonely moments, with everyday life’s anxieties and losses, what we endure no longer need seem somehow foreign to what we once thought of as a hands-off God. Not when that God has lived in the thick and the excrement of the worst of human life. Not when the Trinity brings God into what we stare down and have to, in our own daily detours and tragedies, find a way through.