Contemplating the Trinity: More than I Bargained for
For some time I’ve been pondering the Trinity. Nothing like a huge topic! And it’s a belief some find it hard to muster much enthusiasm for. Isn’t the doctrine all about some archaic and esoteric meanderings of idle minds?
But I’m testing a hunch: That Big Truths have to do with little relational realities, or intense ones, like sitting in a parent’s lap after a childhood fright, or the quickening pulse of romance, or the flaring or burning out of a friendship, or the fragile joys and even the sorrowed wreckages of living with others. I’m thinking of the everyday as an entrée into the transcendent. I’m envisioning a faith that partakes of both the lofty and gut-wrenching, the thrilling and terrifying, the grubby and glorious.
So I’m thinking that of all the ways we have to conceive of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in all their immense, wondrous goodness, why wouldn’t our daily relationships provide some analogies? The very names are relational. Why not incorporate the realities of ordinary interpersonal longing and estrangement and hurtful distances to my categories for life in God?
I’m trying rather to pray my way in to better understanding, asking God to help me see in the Trinity a picture of intimacy that while it perplexes or astonishes, also attracts. I’m thinking there’s more drama to the dogma than typically thought.
The Trinity prompts us to ask questions like: Is there a divine Someone, a Presence, that for all its seeming sometimes hiddenness still somehow comes close by in our moments of estrangement? Maybe a majestic Who, a relatable Being that seems to draw back at times, but in some paradox, will not let me pull away? Even if I try some days to give the enterprise up?
And I’m thinking of our own stories: of love and loss, of absence and presence, intimacy and betrayal. I have been over the last while trying to trace my flawed family sadnesses in the light of how I pray. What I recall sometimes has made me cringe inwardly. Doing so, though, seems a way for a reckoning with who I am. With where I see my faith leading. In the absences or doubts I haven’t given up thinking how, as Abraham Joshua Heschel put it, “the ineffable inhabits the magnificent and the common.” Or inhabits the heartbreaking. Some days a glory hides in the gory. Something good is found in the heartsick news. Something goes on in both the excruciating and exhilarating that I hope I don’t miss.
And when I turn in those moments to a God whose story is found in the Trinity, I see a picture more gritty than polite. Not just the heights of intimacy that Jesus enjoyed in his moments of earthly communion with his heavenly Father, but also the abandonment the Gospel writers describe him experiencing in the Crucifixion. This is a belief with the pedigree of gutsy and bloodied authenticity.
A theologian once said that we always talk about God “within earshot” of the suffering and dying Jesus. The Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit all lived amid an epic of harrowing, and yet also hopeful proportions. This is hardly a doctrine that is all about the sterile or merely heady. So I’m encouraged to keep going with my pondering. Even knowing that it may get more intense than I at first bargained for.