It’s Trinity Sunday, a day when Christians celebrate the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.This is an ancient discernment that Divinity itself is ONE with three distinct self-expressions, all divine and mediated through Creation, through the Created, and through a Holy Spirit, traveling music for the unitive flow of energy. I guess this is why one of the lectionary readings for this Sunday is from Genesis 1:1–2:3—the entire Creation account according to the ancient priestly writers.
I recall one professor loudly proclaiming: “Yes, the trouble doesn’t start till Genesis 2:4b when God foolishly decided to create us earthlings in the divine image and gave us freedom to choose good and evil.” We can choose God or not.
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What better Sunday than Trinity Sunday to weave a new tale of coherence in the Christian faith I embrace, the faith that, according to Mother Teresa is the Christian FAITH not the Christian Certainty.
Andrew McGowan, Dean of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, wonders about the Genesis reading for Trinity Sunday. He points out that Genesis as a trinitarian story is not just because God is called “we” in Genesis, but because Genesis is about “the complexity of divine purpose, action and presence” throughout. Genesis never stops, I’d say.
Still, I’m not a scholar/professor, and this is not a lecture with grades for superb parroting. Also, doctrine is not the same as dogma. No one knows precisely what the nature of Divinity is. Some of us, of course, think we do, then set up prohibitive fences like certitude, to protect our own interpretation. What the Trinity does is to keep God alive and bristling with energy, available to all—inclusive and not mediated by any single religion, viewpoint, or source.
We are endowed with unique gifts: imagination, intuition, creativity, and yearning. We also get signs, hints, intuitions, dreams and occasionally a cattle-prodding wallop from a source we do not control but which we recognize as not entirely of our own making. These signs we label Mystery. I call them God-incidences.
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A good friend and wise professor recently commented that a Mystic was someone who experienced the divine, aka God, without mediation. My immediate thought was: there’s no such thing as an unmediated experience. It can only come to us through us—our prayers, senses, intuitions, imagination, even our unconscious as vision. Of course such an experience can come to us from outside us, but it still comes to us through us. It is Divinity Immanent.
Helen Keller learned to know the world through touch. When her teacher Annie wondered aloud how to communicate God to Helen, Helen answered: “Oh, I already know God.”
In the 1970’s, when I was a young mother of four growing children from fifteen to eight, I was in the midst of baking whatever number batch of chocolate chip cookies I’d baked as part of my maternal repertoire. I’d meticulously laid out all the ingredients. There were no cookie mixes then, or if there were I deemed the use of them as cheating. On what? Oh, on the ideal image of the contented housewife. As I plodded through this routine, I thought with affection of the children who would delight in my cookies. I was also bored. I felt like a metronome, not missing a beat of the the musical score written for my role. In my mind I heard my children’s lilting voices and saw them dashing into the kitchen, lifting my mood, grabbing a cookie then running out to play in whatever weather was available, their exuberance a guarantee of my maternal worth and my love. They were a delight. My ennui was not their fault in any way. Nor was it mine. Nor was it my husband’s who worked hard to make sure we were financially secure.
Still, I knew there was something missing. Suddenly I smelled the odor of burned cookies. I jumped into action to save my cookies. As I did, I also heard a voice from deep within me, or from far beyond me. It was not harsh or confrontational. It was firm and gentle. It grabbed my attention. I wept.
Why are you doing this?
I had no idea how to answer the question. I knew it didn’t sound like my own voice—exactly. I knew I had to answer. Was this the voice of God? Possibly. Am I a mystic? No. But I knew this question interrupted my boredom, my uncertainty. I knew it was mediated through the odor of burning cookies and the depth of my own soul’s discontent. I also knew it was not from far away or high above, but deeply embedded in the ongoing, immanent trinitarian process. It was not Divinity Transcendent. * * * *
P.S. I cannot resist now sharing the thought that popped into my head this morning: Gallia est omnis divisa in tres partes. (Gaul was the region we know as ancient western Europe.) My Latin teacher would recite this magically as if we should remember it. AND Gaul is still one Gaul. How galling.
