Transforming Trinity

After the great liturgical journey of Advent through to Pentecost, the very next Sunday is kept as Trinity Sunday, which has no other purpose than simply to celebrate God as God. It is interesting that some of the sermons, which stick in my mind from my childhood, are those from Trinity Sunday. I remember the regular annual attempt to explain how God can be both three and one at the same time. Earlier in my career as a preacher I myself kept this tradition alive, each year attempting to explain what is meant by the Holy Trinity. Such preaching was about metaphysics and the attempt to unpack the world of Greek philosophy of some seventeen centuries ago. I now think that such preaching is wrong, because it misses the point. Trinity Sunday should be about celebrating the reality of God and not an occasion when we need to feel obliged to explain what the Athanasian Creed describes as being ‘incomprehensible’.  But then my own perspective of Trinity has radically changed as I have moved through life. I would be interested to trace whether scholarship has radically shifted over my lifetime, or whether I have simply moved deeper into the life of God. Or perhaps it is a combination of both of these. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is important to me, for it was a way of seeing God I grew up to accept, even if I found it hard to understand. But my journey of faith has led me to leave behind Trinity as a metaphysical concept. I have moved into the experience of the Divine as a dynamic community of life in which God calls the tune and I am invited to dance. This has been a radically different understanding of faith as I have grown into a living experience of God. It is characterized by what is often called the apophatic tradition. For me a key staging post was the discovery of the book The Cloud of Unknowing and the realization that prayer needs to lead beyond all pictures, symbols and language about God into a place in which we encounter the mystery that lies behind these pictures. So I am bemused by the sterile debate between fundamentalist Christians and the New Atheists. What some Christians fight so hard to protect, and what people like Richard Dawkins fights so hard to condemn, is a perspective that I left behind several decades ago.

The Trinity epitomises a perspective on God which has been fundamental to my faith all my life, but which has led me to a place in which the landscape has changed beyond all recognition. I love such change and I believe that, rather than seeing the Christian faith as being a description of another world, expressed in terms of the language of this world, Christ leads us into an experience of the Divine which lies at the heart of this world, but which opens up new perspectives on what it means to live a fully human life which are radically life changing. What is more, we need to be prepared to be surprised by God and by this new world each and every day of our lives. It is about such things that I plan to write from time to time. Perhaps no one is listening, but the thought that someone might read this helps to sharpen the mind and focus on the need for clarity in sharing my perspective.

Trinity is also the name for what might come to be seen as the most important event of the Twentieth Century, which was the birth of the atomic age and the point at which humankind began to unleash the very processes by which the dust of which we are made came to be formed in the stars. Trinity was the name of the first atomic bomb, the one detonated in a desert in New Mexico on 16^th July 1945. It represents that moment in which we finally managed to turn mass into energy and we opened up a whole new world and the risk of new possibilities, both good and bad. I often weep in frustration at a Church which tries so hard to defend the status quo in life and fails to be the agent of transformation and new life.  The transforming life of the Trinity draws us into mystery in which life becomes so much more vivid and transfigured and in which the scaffolding of religious faith ceases to be of any value, unless it is to draw us into such new living.