Trinity – Three Persons In One God
There are a few occasions when every preacher finds preaching difficult, and Trinity Sunday is one of them. On this Sunday, we realise afresh the impossibility of ever doing God justice by talking about him. Language is too poor to bear the burden of Christianity’s deepest mystery. “Words strain,” the poet TS Eliot wrote, “Crack and sometimes break under the burden, Under the tension, skip, slide, perish/Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place.”
What language can I find for a God who is both high above and deep within me, deeper than my own heart? If I can barely comprehend my own mystery or the mystery of another human being, how can I hope to comprehend the mystery of God?
It is here that some great saints in our tradition, e.g. St. John of the Cross, comes to our rescue. St. John emphasizes our total poverty of expression where God is concerned. God is nothing we can imagine, think, or speak about. What should a preacher on Trinity Sunday recommend therefore? He should say: there’s nothing I can say. When we cannot speak, we must not speak. On this holy ground, we can only be silent.
Trinity Sunday should make contemplatives of us all, that is, people who are not afraid of the demands of silence, who are as content with being as with doing, who are at home not only in activity and purpose, but in quiet and stillness. Faith is about the practice of the presence of God, about discovering and discerning the signs of God’s presence in life. It is about exploration and awareness, about finding meanings and making connections. To do that, we need to learn how to be quiet, become more present and attentive to life, to see what is there, and love what we find.
The French philosopher Blaise Pascal once said that all our troubles derive from one basic fault: our inability to sit still in a room. That is what the contemplatives and mystics down the centuries have always understood. They teach us that when the words run out, we become open to God in a new way, because he is nearer to us than our own souls. It is said today that people are “hungry for meaning.” This is the most elemental of our human hungers, but it is only satisfied when we sense connections between the earthly and the heavenly, when we re-connect in other words with the mystery of God.
Another group of Christians, the Quakers, have something further to teach us in this regard. Their worship is a weekly celebration of the practice of silence. And yet no Christian group has been more active in politics and social concern than they. Contemplation is not passivity. Trinity Sunday means more than what we can’t say. This ‘more’ is about what we can do, indeed must do, if we are to live as God’s faithful. In the Trinity, we see a pattern of relationship that speaks of how we are to be towards others and towards the world. The three-ness of Trinity means community, a society of persons moving constantly out towards one another in self-giving, living and being in that perfect oneness we call by the name of ‘love’.
‘Love’, as the New Testament understands it, is not so much a matter of feelings and passions, as of the will. ‘If you love me you will keep my commandments’. To be a Christian is to acquire the habit of living and loving in this commanded, costly way that Jesus himself acted out, which the Trinity eternally embodies. So, Trinity Sunday calls me to the life of active love: love for my neighbour and community, love for my nation and for the world. There is no other way of being a Christian, no other path shown us by Jesus than this if we are to embody God’s Trinitarian life in the world.
Contemplation and action therefore belong together, as indivisible as loving God and loving my neighbour. The more I practise God’s presence, the more I find myself caring about justice and peace, about the world and society. I need to do more than just pray. ‘What matters for prayer is what we do next’ an English theologian once said. As I therefore immerse myself in the quest for justice, peace and democratic well being, the more I need to be rooted in scripture, sacrament and silence. What matters for action is what we do next, what we do after we act. Silence and contemplation begins and completes the circle.
In today’s gospel, we are told, in John’s famous phrase, that God so loved the world. The sons and daughters of God are called to do the same. Not to excuse the world, or think nothing of its evil and its waywardness, but to love it, to imagine in work and in prayer that it would conform to God’s eternal will for it, which is the well-being of God’s creatures, human and non-human alike.
