Once upon a time a dandelion came to be growing in a meadow. The dandelion whispered to the amino acids and all the other nutrients in the soil:
“You need only to allow yourselves to be dissolved in a drop of water and I will suck you up through my roots. You won’t feel a thing. But afterwards, you will be able to grow and to flower and to fly away in the wind as a thousand miniature parachutes carrying seed.”
“OK,” said the amino acids and other nutrients. They let themselves be dissolved in rainwater, and sucked up through the roots, and they became, dandelion.
The next morning a rabbit came hopping along the meadow.
“Good Morning!” the rabbit said to the dandelion. “How would you like to become rabbit? You will have to allow yourself to become nibbled and swallowed. It hurts a little, but afterwards you will be able to jump and bounce and romp in the moonlight, wiggle your ears, and have lots of baby rabbits.”
The dandelion was not overly enthusiastic, but the idea of hopping around sounded like a lot more fun than just being stuck, in one place. “Okay,” said the dandelion with a sigh, and allowed itself to be munched and become a rabbit.
Toward evening, a hunter came by. “Good Evening!” said the hunter to the rabbit (for he was an unusually polite hunter). “How would you like to become human? You must allow yourself to be chased, shot dead, skinned, cooked in a stew, and eaten. This is not pleasant, I admit, but afterward you will be able to play yoyo, sing in the shower, and fly in a jet plane.”
The rabbit was scared, but flying in jet plane seemed so exciting that the idea was irresistible. So sniffing a little and wiping away a tear, the rabbit mumbled “OK,” went through with that ordeal, and became human.
The next morning the human became aware of a unifying presence, just beyond any personal reach. The human was so intrigued at what this could really mean, that he listened.
Until, that is, a voice said this: “Tell me, how would you like to become God?”
God? If you don’t sign up to that word, just for now, let’s stick to the word life. The point is that life is Being in communion, and life is all a relationship. To experience the fullest life means we are more than just genes and psychological patterns. We are aware of life, not just our model of life.
The scientific model suggests 14 billion years ago nothing exploded into something, and this nothing exploded into all of us, we who breathe the same air the trees breathe out, who are made of the same matter as the stars.
We are all part of one dynamic, unified system, and the word universe actually means One changing, and so, this seemingly separate life is actually interconnected. Difference is not separation, and we are in this together, like it or not, members of one another, as St Paul said.
But the way life is re-presented today, we’d be forgiven for completely forgetting this fact. Because at a fundamental level we believe we are separate, which feeds our guilt, our fear, our pride, our maladaptive coping, our anger, our suffering and our violence.
On an ecological level we destroy the earth, on an international level we destroy each other, and on an individual level we distract ourselves with an illusion of entertainment and control, and by never contemplating our own death. Beauty is replaced by glamour.
Our celebrity filled television is all about my body, my house or my garden, as if the limit of what we can do stops in the mirror or at the garden fence. We are inwardly divided, because we are educated as individuals, bundles of patterns deployed by a controlling independent ego, opposed to other controlling independent egos, each autonomous consumers, reduced to what we can measure, aspiring to be the sum total of purchases and lifestyle choices, in the technological bondage of a closed human conceptual system. Fake life. Alienation. To use and older word, sin.
And so true religion always calls us back, reminds us that being a person is being a part of one whole. Life is more than genes and psychological patterns, and the religious model of Unity in Trinity matters because three in One indicates life is beyond us, within us, and between us, and each aspect of this is One.
As Ephesians says, with wisdom and understanding, he made known to us the mystery of his will, to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth, under Christ.
By entering Christianity, we don’t have to leave humanity behind. John’s prologue says “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.” The beginning is the Big bang, and the wisdom of God, which is the cosmic mind principle Jesus embodied, we humans can also embody.
One Lord and Father of all, who is above all, through all, and in all, saving us from egocentricity, reminding us we all have one mutual source, one true Self, one dynamic dance in the creatures. Such is the intimacy between the Father beyond, the Son within and the Spirit between, that they not only embrace each other, but they also enter into each other, permeate each other, and dwell within each other.
We are not ancient Greeks, we are not ancient Romans, we are not even ancients. But even here in the 21st century, the compound Unity of the Trinity means relationship is at the centre of all life, and complete mutual love and knowledge, not just dry mathematics, are infinitely shared. Nor is this ancient theology.
There is a relationship of being, a mutual indwelling, or to use the Greek term, a perichoresis. Since there is a lot of fake life, life taken far too personally, let’s remember that the word persona literally means mask. Getting behind this mask is intrinsic to becoming unsuperficial, authentic, and to knowing who you are.
Which is why St Francis of Assisi once said this: you are looking for what is looking. In other words, the One is knowing itself in you, or as another Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart said, the eye with which I see God is the eye with which God sees me. Or to get a bit closer to the Bible, as Jesus is reported to say in St John’s gospel: “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they be one in us.”
On the face of it, we are all different, but we are each midwives to One grace, because differentiation is not really separation. This is why Rublev’s icon of the Trinity, painted in 1410, shows Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as androgynous, heads bowed, deferring to one another. There’s a space for you to sit, be welcomed, join the dance of eternal life.
Which is all very poetic, but why did the Trinity ever appear as dogma at all?
Because, from a human standpoint, which is possibly why it took a few centuries to formulate it, there was a real problem about saying Jesus of Nazareth was especially divine, that God was directly present in him, without compromising that precious Jewish belief that God is One.
So the answer people arrived at acknowledged that God continued to govern from Heaven, the Spirit communicated him, while Jesus revealed him in person. Problem solved. God could remain One being, or Homo-ousious to use the language of the day, but in three persons, as co-eternal, ie. none of them came first. Father Son and Holy Spirit, one Being in three persons, became the Christian idea of God. Well, give or take the odd clause, which we will come to.
You don’t find this in the Bible, but there are pointers. John’s gospel says the spirit descends upon Jesus like a dove to confirm him as the Son of God. And the letter to the Romans says this Spirit, which was to embolden the disciples and enable healing, witnessing and speaking in other languages, could enable us.
“When we cry “Abba! Father!” it is that very spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, heirs, and if heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.”
But Christ is not some deadening certainty. Christ is a path we walk, a practice, an orthopraxy, with the Spirit’s company, to be lead into One Father. This is not uniformity, but unity in diversity, so it co-operates.
Of course it is a paradox. How can one really be three? And St Augustine apparently said that as soon as you start counting you are already into heresy, so the Western Church tended to stress God’s Oneness, while the Eastern emphasised the three-ness.
“But God doesn’t exist!” protests today’s atheist. Eastern Fathers also said he didn’t. As we understand existence. God is a spirit, and the Eastern Orthodox way of Church is more spiritual, knowing as it does that God is not a thing, but that God contains every other thing, that matter is in spirit, not the other way around, and that self-knowledge, or Gnosis, is key to understanding. It reminds us how Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are relations in process, not static names, just as life is not static, even beyond death.
It is said of our personal life that our own skeleton is completely replaced in a mere seven years, so we are clearly not static. How much more so the persons of the Trinity. Father Son and Holy Spirit are distinguished not by different hair colour and different likes and dislikes, but by relating differently to one another, dynamically, through Fatherhood beyond, Son-ship within, and Sanctification, or holiness, that is, wholeness, between.
And now for that odd clause I promised you. The Western church, in the eyes of the East, downplayed the role of the Holy Spirit, by adding, in 589, a new clause to the Creed. The Filioque clause, which literally means and the Son.
"We believe in the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and the Son." In Eastern Christian eyes, this is not true. The Spirit only proceeds from the Father. To the Orthodox, the Holy Spirit is more than Jesus’ Spirit, something charismatic churches may sympathise with. There is no hierarchy requiring Jesus. The Holy Spirit is abroad in the world.
In case this is all irrelevant, what matters is the transcendent, that matter is in spirit, not the other way around, so life is more than genes and psychological patterns. Christian life means we live together in interdependence within God beyond.
To experience and participate in the bliss of this divine life is to be able to see ourselves as relational processes within the more and ever more, to change, but to be aware of the change. To release our grasp, enabling the Spirit to be in the heights and the depths of life.
This is the challenge of the Trinity today, to release our autonomy, here and now, and for eternity. We cannot live until we die, and let mutual indwelling happen.
In a nutshell, our awareness is not ours, but we are in it. It is God.
So I invite you to become still. Feel your breath rise and fall, and ask yourself if you are making it happen.. or is God’s spirit actually breathing you. Feel the weight of your body... notice all the colours in your field of vision… and hold them in attention… Hear as many sounds as you can…. notice the silence from which they all rise and to which they all fall.. and rest alert, in presence.
And may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with us all, evermore, Amen +
