Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Adam McCoy, OHC
Trinity Sunday B - Sunday, June 03, 2012
Isaiah 6:1-8
Romans 8:12-17
John 3:1-17
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| A ceramic Celtic Trinity symbol found on the grounds of our Monastery when walking down to the Hudson River |
When I was a teenager growing up in Las Vegas, most of my friends were Mormons, because Southern Nevada was and remains - the residential part, anyway - culturally Mormon. My dad was the local Episcopal priest, and so I got a lot of the questions about religion. The Mormon form of Christianity does not express its belief in God, in Jesus Christ, in the Holy Spirit in traditional Christian doctrinal terms. So this incompletely instructed young Episcopalian, formed in the traditional beliefs, found himself in a religious culture where he was in the minority, where the watchword about God was “What we are, He once was; what He is we will become”; where such doctrines as the Incarnation and the Trinity take on quite different meanings, if they are named at all.
In these adolescent theological seminars, the usual course on the Trinity was for the young Latter Day Saint to pin down the budding Anglican by getting one to admit that when Jesus was resurrected, the Church had to find an explanation and so hit on the Incarnation, a head-trippy way of explaining the experienced phenomenon of a human being who was also divine. And when the Holy Spirit came along at Pentecost, same thing. Now there were three manifestations of God who had to be fitted into the monotheistic concept, and so the philosophical and verbal gyrations which took some four centuries or more to bring about the classic doctrine of the Trinity began. Not that my Mormon friends knew that doctrine or its history in any subtlety. But the general take was that traditional Christianity had somehow, like Jacob, wrestled with the angel and won, but the victory left something badly dislocated.
This experience is useful as more and more of our culture turns away from traditional belief altogether, and turns its polemic on the Church with ever greater force: How can you be serious about something so obviously self-contradictory as the belief that God is both One and Three?
For a long time I thought the “problem” of the Trinity was as described above: the people of God (at least, our people of God) experienced God in three different ways: The God of Israel, in the journeys of faith of the patriarchs, the giving of the Law, and the ups and downs of the Chosen People; the person of Jesus Christ, in his incarnation, in his life and teaching, and in his passion, death and resurrection; and the Holy Spirit, descending on the Apostles in the upper room at Pentecost, then guiding the young Church step by step as described in the Acts of the Apostles. It was a sequence, and the Church worked it out eventually in all its nuances to give us the complex and mysterious doctrine we have today.
But there is another way to approach the mystery of God than this bald, reductive and incomplete rendering of *Heilsgeschichte* (German for "salvation history"). I want to suggest that it begins with the insight of the Torah itself into the nature of God, and particularly in the understanding of the ancient Israelites of the primordial events of creation.
Who is God? If Genesis does anything at all, it proclaims the message that God is before all that is. Before matter, before time. Before words were spoken. Before anything was distinguished from anything else. When in Exodus Moses, needing credentials for his work in Egypt, presses God to give his Name, that is, to describe his essence, God says “I am what I am. Tell them I am has sent you.” The famously untranslatable tetragrammaton Y-H-W-H: I am. I will be. What there is is what I am. I am becoming what I am becoming. And so forth.
The Hebrew conviction was and is that God is what was before there was anything at all. God is the one who brings being into being. God is inexpressible because God is before all the words, all the categories, all the concepts of thought. God is ... the very idea of “is-ness” implies an “other-ness”, that there can be an “is-not”. God is before, beyond, behind any category of thought, before “being” itself as we can conceive it. Before the creation of all that “is” in all its multiplicity, God is One. God is All.
This ineffable mystery is essentially impenetrable. Even the word “God”, the act of naming, implies linguistic differentiation, which implies a stance apart from the One, which is not possible if there is only One. We are creatures and cannot help using our minds formed in a world of time and sequence and differentiation to describe God. But no description can suffice. At a certain point, if we get close enough, all we can do is take off our shoes because it is holy ground and fall on our faces, because what “God” is is too much for us, too dangerous to get too close.
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was a formless void, there was darkness over the deep, and God’s spirit hovered over the water. God said, ‘Let there be light’, and there was light.”
(Gen. 1:1-3)
It is all God. The spirit is God and the word spoken is God. The Hebrew writer describes the coming into being of being and in that coming into being there is God, God as spirit and God as word. The narrative is sequential because human speech, uttered as time passes, requires that one word be placed after another. But the reality described is not sequential. It is simultaneous. God, God as spirit, God as word, are one, acting as one, before time, creating time. It is our narrative mind that requires sequence.
“Language conceals thought even more than it expresses it”, as our Founder, Fr. Huntington, puts it in the Rule of our Order. When we try to express something, we cannot do so without time and sequence and causation and substance, and so when we try to describe the nature of God, we are always caught in the contradiction that God cannot be described and yet we are driven by our God-given natures to do what cannot be done, to describe the one who is beyond all describing.
The beginning of what is is God as One and God as Three. “We worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; Neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance,” as Athanasius encourages us to believe and proclaim.
God the mystery. God, God in spirit, God in word, the beginning and the continuing life and the end of all that is, “Of whom all nature hath creation, eternal Father, Spirit, Word.”
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