2022.06.12 Trinity Sunday. IT'S THE LANGUAGE!

For years I have squawked and lobbied, consistently and at varying levels of intensity about the need to change traditional theological language—words and ideas we Christians use to describe the image of God.  HE, HIM, HIS, ALMIGHTY, TRANSCENDENT, SUPERMAN OMNI-EVERYTHING. 

We have for millennia worshipped this Divinity, voiced from afar, presiding from above, empowering from without. Oh, I do know that there are many people, especially women, who wonder and protest such a patriarchal Divinity, even as they sing and praise otherwise. I know that many academics teach new ideas. Every Sunday School I ever attended and most preachers anywhere told me God was Love. And, yes, the Bible tells us so, too. 

What’s a girl to do? I fretted and even wrestled with this issue in my waking sleep. In my mind I howled at God, fretting about upcoming Pentecost and Trinity Sundays. What to say in my weekly blog? I thought God was silent because I could take care of this issue by myself. As I tossed about in my half-sleep I heard this: IT’S THE LANGUAGE!

It’s the language? The language?  I already know this. But what if this were God speaking directly to me? I thought it might truly be the bath kol  (Hebrew for the voice of God). If it were simply my own inner voice speaking to myself I’d have heard: “It’s the language, STUPID!”  

But God does not call anyone stupid. We do. 

*  *  *  * 

Feeling spiritually bolstered, I calmed down and considered exactly how and why words matter and words about God matter deeply?  I cringed at the number of times a good editor would write “WC” in my margins. WC= word choice, as in find a better word to make your point.  

It’s Trinity Sunday. I love the idea that God is One, a Creator whose singular divine immensity is shared with humanity and in all living things, yes flowers and weeds.

Now consider the language we Christians use to express this amazing mystery. 

FATHER=GOD  This WC is both gender-bound AND role-bound. Divinity is restricted.

SON=GOD        This WC is also restricted to male roles and gender. Jesus was a man. Christ, his title, is gender-free. 

HOLY SPIRIT = GOD  This WC is more free yet still is masculinized in some liturgies, some credal statements, and, though more mobile, remains exclusive. Some churches change the Spirits’ gender to She, but that feels condescending, a kindly and unofficial nod. 

This Trinitarian formula and its traditional language must be used by Episcopal clergy to baptize.

I used the required formula, adding another such as:  “I baptize you in the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, God, Creator, Christ and Holy Spirit.” My much longer-ordained spouse did the same.

Why quibble and bother? For me, the theological idea behind the Holy Trinity means the joining of humanity and divinity through sacramental grace—in Baptism and in Eucharist. When our WCs  bind BOTH divinity AND humanity into role and gender language, they undermine God the Creator’s immensity, restrict humanity and all nature, and generally fail to communicate what the Holy Trinity—three in one AND one in three— means. 

*  *  *  *

I’m an Episcopal priest, a spiritual director, and pastoral counselor, retired. I believe in the healing power of sacraments, music, and beautiful liturgy. I am not alone in feeling frustrated about the consistently patriarchal imaging of God in Christianity. I am also in my eighties, and I’m tired with not enough stamina to be a Job. 

Michael Hudson, Episcopal priest writes a meditation on cosmogenesis for Trinity:

The union of created life and God

eludes our understanding, but we trust

that here and now and through the sweep of time

we each exist in God. And God in us.” 

It is simply not that hard to get our WC’s together, to accurately represent an already beautiful idea, and to listen to God saying: IT’S THE LANGUAGE,  BELOVEDS.

Not only is the traditional language idolatrous, worshipping not God but the culture from which this language derives, it is also aesthetically clumsy. Try Creator, Christ and Holy Spirit.  

2016.05.22 Trinity Mystery

We live in a Mystery we do not understand, and we are grateful.

People say the Holy Trinity is a mystery, and so it is. But that doesn’t mean I do not keep on trying to understand it anyway. I am a wondering person. Possibly, I should be more afraid or humble, but I’m neither very well.

With divine mystery everything is up for grabs and too deep to measure. Nevertheless . . . the early Christians discerned a Divinity they called 3 in 1 and 1 in 3. Easy peasy, right? They experienced the ONE God as cosmic, close, and connected—all at once. This they called Father, Son, and Holy Ghost and turned it into a doctrine about the triune nature of God. There followed creeds and liturgies and fights. Holy Writ was born—and a formula of blessing for all things holy. 

Over time calcification set in and the original experience was robbed of its brilliance. But not entirely. Wondering people, great and small, continued to come up with bright ideas for the Mystery we do not understand and for which we are grateful.

St. Augustine         Lover, Beloved, and Love itself.
                                God loves everyone as if each were all
           

Bernard of Clairvaux       Love of self for self’s sake
                                            Love of God for self’s sake
                                            Love of God for God’s sake
                                            Love of self for God’s sake


Jesus   “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. .  .
              the Spirit of  Truth will guide you into all truth . . .  (John 16: 12-15) 


Emily Dickinson     Tell all the truth but tell it slant -

                                 Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
                                 Success in Circuit lies
                                 Too bright for our infirm Delight
                                 The Truth’s superb surprise
                                 As Lightning to the Children eased
                                 With explanation kind
                                 The Truth must dazzle gradually
                                 Or every man be blind —


Douglas Witte, organist and music director, St. John’s Episcopal, Charlestown

 “The three section ‘Piece d’Orgue’ is Bach’s meditation on the idea of the Trinity. The first          section consists of a single voice executing a fleet series of three note figures. This represents God, three persons in one, and the non-stop nature of the section is omnipresence.”


Lyn G. Brakeman, priest and author

    Author, Book, Readers.

    The Author has a grand idea deep within;
    She muses upon it, ripens it, and writes it down in a Book;
    Readers read the book, digest it, and spread the idea, according to their own styles


The author dies, the book goes out of print, readers forget. The Idea lives on.

2012.09.02 What a Hoooot!!

Now that I’ve figured out how to get a photo on my blog I am feeling like fun. Also, I’m sick of the heaviness of politics and religion right now!!  So I got this photo of the Holy Trinity. 

Just look at these three wunderkind.  They peer out at me. I see a metaphor for Christianity’s oft-thought idiotic idea of supreme Oneness with a multiple personality disorder.  Can you think of a better way of making sure you get through to a bunch of devoted, hopeful but blundering, earthlings than giving them multiple choice, all options divine?  (OK I know owls are raptors but it's a metaphor!—and my cuddly stuffed owls guide me waking and guard me sleeping; they just don't smile much:)

Three lookalikes with three divine ways of being Being-in-being.
     Check the enormous inquisitive eyes, far-seeing, able to spot, know, and love, even the tiniest critter.
     And the gigundra wing-span—enough to swoop above and into the universe with angel-power.  
    All this and the wisdom to be nocturnal, enough humility to be quiet, only an occasional hoot to let us know She is still there while the weary world sleeps in peace.

 Who said three was a difficult arrangement? 

2012.06.03 God Grows and Grows: How I Learned the Trinity

I’d seen pictures of God in my favorite book The Little Book About God, published just two years before I was born by  Doubleday. God was an old man reclining on a cloud creating myriad wonders on earth below—His Earth. I was impressed by the Creation thing,  but what grabbed me by the scruff of my soul was God’s odd personality quirk—listening.  

God would sit for hours in a garden and listen to all the sounds of Earth, identifying and cataloguing every single sound, including “weeny sounds” like the soft weeping of a little girl, a sound so small it was “very hard to locate.”  But God found it. 

I had a difficult time when my grandmother moved into our small NewYork apartment with us and the dining room became the only place for her bed. She had bad ears. Mastoiditis they said. No wonder she had bad ears. I could see they were too long, hanging down all along her cheeks. I resented her ears. It was because of them that she needed care and moved in so my dining room table sanctuary moved out.  God, to me, lived under that table. Where would God live now? 

I sucked my thumb double time and raw and my pout deepened as I grieved my table and re-thunk God.  While I wondered I still talked to God who listened, table or no table.

That was how I learned that God must be intimately a part of my own spiritually charged imagination and didn’t dwell solely there any more than God dwelt under my table.

God got around. God lived nowhere and everywhere. God lived in me and in you, not just in Jesus like the church said. God was free.

My experience and the images it generated helped me digest what the church calls the Holy Trinity, whose Sunday it is today,  because it made God plural, deeply relational,  mobile and multiform, read, less patriarchal uber-MAN in the sky, and decidedly un-housable.

2012.01.25 Aging With Faith

“The older I get the more I believe and the fewer beliefs I have.”

This is the wisdom of the Rt. Rev. John Shelby Spong, retired bishop of the diocese of Newark, author and theological provocateur. He recently spoke at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge and I zeroed in on these words.

Wise and true I thought. And my mother who today would have been 100 years old would have loved it, she who mostly thought religious doctrines were “for the birds.”

I admit however that, although I do have more faith and care less about beliefs as intellectual tenets, my mind is rarely clear of theological ideas, all new to me, all brilliantly alluring, and all illuminating my faith and inflaming my heart.

This morning I woke up thinking that the Holy Trinity was a trifecta of energy—Creativity, Empathy, Travelocity— a race in which all three finish first, as one. Corny/silly, but it woke me up joyful.

I could only wish such a trifecta assault on our country so bogged down in the morass of contention for its own sake.

President Obama in his State of the Nation speech last night spoke of strength hidden in the nation’s depths. He again envisioned, begged for, cooperation. Is it too late to access it? He is a visionary who has grounded and become pragmatic.

Who could argue with common sense ideas like tax equity in this time of radical and dangerous economic inequity? How ingenious was it to compare the military strategy, command, to stick together for the sake of the mission no matter what, with what politicians must do now?

We shall all have to sacrifice, god forbid, competition, pride, greed, misogyny, and war. I have faith in the people to cast their secret ballots in the direction that makes sense, no matter what their leaders urge.

I’m sure that before too long I will tone down, and dull out, and store all my smart-ass faith wisdom in my one small faithful heart, there to be reduced and contained and claimed by Godde when I die.

But for now I’m filled with re-imagined beliefs.

Happy Birthday Mom.