The Divine Proportions Of The Trinity

Exodus 34: 6 (from the first reading)

The Lord passed before him, and proclaimed, ‘The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.

John 3: 16 (from the Gospel)

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

(Blessing) May almighty God bless you, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I’ve been thinking about visual weight today.

Anyone who has composed a photograph or a piece of art, laid out a page for publishing, framed a painting, planned some interior decoration, arranged some flowers or done anything that has elements of composition to it has dealt with visual weight. A large bold painting with a dark heavy frame on a wall has a lot of visual weight while a same sized delicate painting with a narrow light colored frame has much less visual weight. If you have the two situated on either side of a wall, it will feel like the room has the potential of tipping over on the side of the heavy item. It feels uncomfortable and out of balance.

As I was assessing how to balance out the visual weight of an item on my wall, I thought briefly about Trinity Sunday. As I thought about it, I recalled an image that, in my younger days, always used to come to mind whenever I thought about the Trinity.

 First, there was God, the Father, the Almighty: the spiritual heavyweight of the Three in One. My personal image of him probably came from the Old Testament: yes, he was merciful and loved me but he was also omnipotent and powerful, a God who filled the heavens with his heavy awesome presence, easily offended and was definitely not someone to take lightly. His expression was stern. The God of Tough Love.

Next came Jesus, his Son. He loomed large in the line up but his presence was more light-filled than his Father’s presence. Whereas the Father was surrounded by thunderclouds, the clouds Jesus stood on were fluffy and benign. His expression was one of forgiveness but it was always tinged with an ever-present disappointment. “How could you have done that to me?” 

Then came the Holy Spirit. I think. It was pretty hard to see him. He didn’t seem to have much form or shape at all, let alone a facial expression. He was white bird, a shimmering feathery wind with little bits of flame here and there. He didn’t seem to have a real personality or will of his own but was there to benignly carry out the wishes of the Father and the Son. If the word ‘issue’ could be painted, I guess that’s what the Holy Spirit looked like to me. Maybe. Hard to tell. If only he could have stayed still for a minute I might have been able to make out more detail. He was definitely the visual lightweight of the three.

Of course, these images flashed through my mind in the space of a couple of seconds but what struck me was the visual imbalance of what I used to imagine the Trinity to look like. I don’t think I’m alone in having these subconscious images, mostly because these images reflect how a lot of artists have portrayed one or the other of the Trinity down through the ages. They are common images.

And very misleading.

It’s misleading to have any images of any one of the Trinity at all just because of our limited capacity to understand and define God.  St. Augustine said something to the effect that anything we say about God or anything we envision him to be will be more wrong than it is right. Thomas Aquinas, after contributing so much to Catholic theology as well as composing amazing hymns had a mystical experience of God near the end of his life that caused him to write, "All that I have written appears to be as much straw after the things that have been revealed to me."

When we envision the Trinity and see three very different manifestations of God’s nature, we are unwittingly dividing him into separate entities and putting each of these individual sets of characteristics into little boxes. And what are we supposed to do with these interesting boxed frozen images? Put them up high on a shelf somewhere outside of us? Go and look at them when we want to pray while keeping a respectful distance between them and ourselves?  Without thinking about it, we create static images with imbalanced weights. Often, we choose a favorite image, one that we feel most at ease with, one that doesn’t make us feel insecure, uncomfortable or out of balance.

It’s certainly not easy to grasp the reality of the Trinity but the importance of that reality is one of the reasons why we celebrate the mystery of the Trinity. There are no different visual weights within the Trinity. Each person of the Trinity is fully and completely God. To put it in very human terms, every quark, lepton and boson of God is present in all three persons of the Trinity. Every thought, every shape of wisdom, every powerful movement and every atom of sacrificial love and unbounded creativity is fully present and active in God the Father, in God the Son and in God the Holy Spirit.

It would seem harmless but by divvying them up in our heads, we dilute our own grasp of the full power and love of God. By making the Father symbolic of one certain aspect of God and Jesus symbolic of another aspect while the Holy Spirit comes and goes hither and yon, we subtract elements of God from each one of the three, making each of them, in our minds, much less than they really are.

To show you what I mean, the next time you read something from the Gospels, substitute ‘the Father’ or ‘the Holy Spirit’ for the name of Jesus. In one Good Friday reflection that I wrote I said that the Father did not abandon Jesus on the cross to suffer alone. The Father was on the cross with him suffering exactly the same things Jesus was suffering. Where was the Holy Spirit in all this? On the cross, dying horribly. We cannot put the Trinity in different places feeling and doing divergent things like random characters in a story.

We read in this week’s gospel the famous passage from John 3: ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.’  You might as well read that as, “For God so loved the world that he gave himself, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life,” or “For the Holy Spirit so loved the World that he gave himself, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

What difference will all this make to your spiritual life? Does it seem like what I’ve been writing is all a matter of semantics, something for theologians to quibble about but has little to do with the day-to-day struggles you have? Is there something in all of this that could transform your prayer life and your relationship with God?

It could, if you take the time to contemplate your own strong but very limited images of the Trinity in order to see that the little boxes are too tight, too small and too static. It could, if you begin to feel like you never really knew God at all and that every picture you’ve ever had of him was more wrong than right. It could, if you are suddenly set adrift in a mystery so profound that all you can do is begin to blindly trust in an eternal kindness and steadfast love so immense that there is no way you can ever hope to capture, visualize or define them adequately. It could, if you begin to realize that prayer should be less ‘to’ someone and should be more ‘in and with’ someone, an entwined intimacy so complex that words become like straw when it comes to precisely describing who you are with – or who you are when you’re with that person.

The Trinity is the deepest, heaviest ocean of lightness and balance you could ever find. You cannot judge each of them visually or describe each one adequately. Staying outside of them will keep you uncomfortable and a little out of balance; you can only take a deep breath, plunge into their midst and trust that what you are unable to define is what is able to save you. 

May almighty God bless you - the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.  May you fall into fullness of all three and become one with the divine proportion.

Amen.