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.
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