What the Trinity Has Over Mountains
Jill and me with a backdrop of glaciers and mountains
My wife and I recently took a trip to the Canadian Rockies to celebrate our 45th wedding anniversary--something special to mark that milestone of our decades of life together.
We saw turquoise lakes and stunning waterfalls; wildlife like bears and bighorn sheep; we stopped at quaint shops. And, no surprise, the most impressive parts of our traveling in the Rockies had to do with mountains: Snow-capped peaks filled our sight just about our whole time there—everywhere we turned. They formed a towering presence, whether we were in Jasper, Lake Louise, the glacial Icefields, or Banff. They were there when we went to sleep and when we woke up: Lofty, immense, impressive, constant. We never got tired of being ringed by craggy slopes.
Mountains symbolize awe-inspiring and majestic might in many cultures. And they are important in the Bible. Just as Jill and I did, Scripture sees in them symbols of something steady, rock-like, massive, even immovable. They manifested for us Creation’s glories and became a marvel for the soul and senses.
But while I have burned in my memory images I will never forget, I see a problem if I stop there. Envision God simply as massive and beautiful and worthy of awe and we miss the richness of a God of great relatability. That picture leaves in the heights a God who wants to descend and condescend. Who wants to communicate kindness to lowly, lovely-to-his-eyes creatures personally fashioned and made.
My friend Seawell once said, “Growing up in the church, God was always ‘up there’ and I’m just Seawell, ‘down here.’” And the distance seemed great. Well, that was something.
But then Seawell found something wonderfully personal in his faith. He discovered something more warmly friendly than nature.
Which bring us to a part of Christian faith I’ve been contemplating: The God we meet in the Bible and in Christ does more than impress, this God also invites. He reaches out to us. From the heavenly heights reaches down to us.
This is not only a God of power or vast beauty, then, but also of love. The One, as the Bible says, who dwells in inapproachable light comes close.
For in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we see a God so rich in relationship, that even before time, God’s nature was to relate.
God is love, the New Testament says. Not just in his loving us, but also in the love among the Persons of the Trinity. For God himself, in his very being, knew love.
Author and pastor Brian McClaren writes, “If … there’s only one God but not three Persons within the one God, then we would expect that the ultimate reality behind the universe could be silence. It could be power. It could be peace. It could be domination.” It could be beauty, I’d add.
But it would not be love.
“Because for love to exist,” he goes on, “there has to be a sharing and there has to be a communication and there has to be a self-giving.”
And here things get more personal. God becomes intimate in the ways he becomes present to us.
The folks at the SALT project write, “[T]he doctrine of the Trinity insists that God is ‘up there, down here, and everywhere,’ even in the shadows of grief and violence, calling all of us toward justice and love.” Even in the shrouded basins of darkness, even in valley of the shadow of death.
Our ancient forebears often understood this better than we do—people like Julian of Norwich, who saw in the Trinity a chance for a loving encounter of delighted, effervescent joy.
We have some “practice” in apprehending this love. We see it, in a small way, in and through our own experiences. I mean times we sit as children in a mother’s lap (like when my mom rocked me and sang, “Froggy Went a-Courting”). I mean what we feel when we look affectionately at a spouse or dear relative. (Even better than the glories of nature for me, for us was celebrating decades of marriage). Or I think of times we sit around a table with a group of friends and know we belong. Or times we do something to bring justice to a broken, torn-up world. We look in these settings, too, for clues about what we can discover in God.
For such experiences are little tastes of the three-personed God’s out-going, ongoing desire to connect with us. A God always wanting to draw close.
If you long to know you are accepted and even precious, the most impressive mountain in the world will never give that assurance. A woodland glade or luminous sunset can fill your sight with awe-worthy scenes, but cannot cherish you when you feel unloved.
But if love is core to who God is, core to who the Trinity is, this God can. And surely will.