Entering Mystery Through Imagination, Trinity Sunday Reflection

This morning, Trinity Sunday, I had the honor of sharing my reflections with my church community. It is ever humbling to have the task of offering my limited understanding. Still I offer what I can and hope that it will invite you into reflection, whether your understanding is similar or different from mine.

Hildegard' of Bingen’s Trinity: a blue masculinr figure in the center with gold and then yellow rings around him. The image is squared off and blue is in the space between the central circles and flowery border. Hildegard didn’t make it into the homily, so I offer this image.

Proverbs 8:22-31, Romans 5:1-5, John 16:12-15

I was walking with my neighbor a few days ago and she pointed out a slime mold. My neighbor is an environmental educator and I learn something new from her every time we walk together. On this particular walk she told me how slime molds are single-celled organisms, often too small for us to see, but when food is scarce, these little beings come together to find food to ensure their survival. Presumably the big blob we were looking at was one such coalition. I think I said something like “Community organizing, single-cell style.” And then I starting thinking about how slime molds might fit into a Trinity Sunday homily. I’ll come back to that in a bit.

Preparing for today I learned a few things about Trinity Sunday, like that in the 4th century, an Alexandrian priest named Arius started spreading the word that Christ was not fully divine. In order to counter what was called the Arian Heresy and reaffirm the trinitarian doctrine of God as three equal persons, and Christ as fully divine, the bishops created a mass dedicated to the trinitarian doctrine, though there wasn’t any set time in the liturgical calendar for the celebration. It was centuries later that Trinity Sunday was set permanently as the Sunday after Pentecost. Apparently, that Sunday was “vacant.” Because many ordinations happened on the Saturday after Pentecost, Church official decided to address the “vacancy” during such an important time by setting this Sunday as Trinity Sunday.

Trinity: the mystery of the three persons/beings/elements of the divine that are at once distinct and all one. I will never fully understand the Trinity, I’m certainly not going to try to explain it today. Instead, I invite us to open our imagination to new ways of understanding our Triune God and consider how this belief might inform our human actions.  

In our first reading from Proverbs, Wisdom Sophia speaks of her relationship with God Creator, Mother who gave birth to her. We see the interrelation between two persons of the Trinity. Wisdom claims her place as the first child of a birthing Mother God, before Creation took physical form. Wisdom, Sophia, Spirit played like a child, was Mother God’s delight and she delighted in humankind. I think she still does. My heart swells with gratitude when I remember three years ago when Wisdom responded to St. William’s communal invitation to play by delighting us with the miracle on 13th Street, relieving us of the burden of a priest and deacon who would not have honored the charism of our community.

In the second reading and the gospel we see the play between the three persons, unitive, working through, with, and in one another, but let’s take a little time with the one most often called the Son. Through Jesus, we experience the divine incarnate, but this second person of the Trinity does not begin and end with Jesus. Richard Rohr writes “The first and cosmic incarnation of the Eternal Christ, the perfect co-inherence of matter and Spirit (Ephesians 1:3-11), happened at the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. Christians believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the human incarnation of that same Mystery a mere 2,000 years ago, when we were perhaps ready for this revelation.” He goes on to say, “This Christ is much bigger and older than either Jesus of Nazareth or the Christian religion, because the Christ is whenever the material and the divine co-exist—which is always and everywhere.” Christ is more than Jesus of Nazareth. Our Trinitarian God exists always and everywhere.   

Fundamentally, the Trinity offers us a model of interrelationship, interbeing, community, three as one, a model of stability. The names of the persons often describe both the relationship of one member to another as well as God’s relationship to us. In many Catholic churches the identities of the three persons of the Trinity are only ever referred to as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. While labels can help us understand, they also limit understanding. When we’re talking about mystery, why limit ourselves? As we make the sign of the cross at St. William in silence, we allow ourselves to name the Trinity in the way that best reflects our current understanding. Perhaps many of us think the words “Creator, Redeemer, Spirit Sanctifier” as we sign. Let me offer a few other names that might expand our imagination, too.

I wonder if we might use Paul’s words of perseverance, character, and hope as a way of understanding our triune God. I have a ring on my finger with three words: strength, courage, wisdom. Might these words help us understand the three aspects of the Trinity?

Doctor of the church St. Catherine of Siena experimented with many different names for the Trinitarian persons. According to Mary George-Whittle, some of Catherine’s descriptions include “remembering, understanding and desiring; power, wisdom and tender clemency [mercy]; O eternal Truth, O eternal Fire, O Eternal Wisdom.” We might also look to Julian of Norwich who named the Trinity in multiple ways, one being “God the Father, Jesus our Mother, and our good Lord the Holy Spirit.” Or what if we used these words: Creator, Liberator, Advocate or Source, Being, and Return to Being.

How might we understand our relational God if we choose no words, but instead simply allow images? Or textures? Or smells? Imagining into the mystery of the Trinity helps us to stay in creative relationship with the divine. As God is relationship, so God calls us to be in relationship, creating, loving, and delighting through and with one another.

And this brings me back to the slime molds. Like those single-celled slime molds, we often act as individuals, trying to survive on our own. We live in times of disconnection, sharp judgment, solid barriers between people or groups of people. Even though our God offers a model of intimate connection, shared empowerment, and permeable boundaries, we isolate, we compete, we cut ourselves off from one another and sometimes even from ourselves. Slime molds seemed to have learned a lesson from our God as coalition, God as community.

We humans sometimes get it right, too, when we come together on Sundays, when we serve our most vulnerable neighbors, when we stand up and speak out for justice, when we believe there is enough for all and act accordingly. Other times, when we most need each other, and I would argue that now is one of those times, we turn away from one another, believing the only way for our singular, or perhaps our particular group’s, survival is through competition, survival of the fittest, guarding what is “ours” rather than leaning into abundance, relationship, and cooperation.

Our God is ever-transforming through relationship. Slime molds, in their single-celled intelligence, seem to have gotten that message, too: “Hey, stick together. You need each other to live.” May we expansively, creatively, and delightedly do the same.