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Sunday Reflection with Fr Robin Gibbons - 27 May 2018


Trinity Sunday

The Spirit itself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if only we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him. (Rm 8:16-17)

On one level I've never found the mystery of the Trinity to be a puzzle, maybe I read too much Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass as a small child, but emotionally I can grasp just how three (or even more if we count ourselves as part of the life of God) aspects of individual being can also be one!

As I muse, in what can be called the harvest time of my life (and a long harvest time I hope), my own key to the Trinity has not primarily been through the theology I have studied and taught all these years (important though that is for supplying the rationale and meaning behind the doctrine) but intuitive guessing. Definitions are always imperfect; light-flashes of the inherent mystery of a life giving God who we experience in three dynamic independent ways, yet at the same time we believe are one.

So, is there any way I can share with you an insight of my own about the Triune God? Would it even help? I've often mentioned that as I grow older in the service of the Church, I begin to realize that I have to let go of many presuppositions, held and learnt in the past. These are not wrong definitions or insights, only that they no longer express what I begin to see and understand, not only through my intellect but also in my will and heart. The growing sense I have is that it is all to do with relationships. Paul writing to the Romans reminds us of our kinship with Christ that makes us Children of the living God bound together in the Spirit (Rm 8:16), but it is in certain words of `Jesus that the real direction opens out in my journey.

Speaking to Martha, Jesus says this to her when she worries about all the things that need doing in the house, it's not a reprimand, by the way, but a gentle word telling her to relax, using the example of her sister Mary whose intention is focussed on Jesus; 'there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.'(Lk 10:42) That phrase 'only one thing' has become part of my own searching, it crops up again and again, such as the story of the rich young man in Mark: "Jesus looked at him and loved him. 'One thing you lack,' he said. 'Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.' "(Mk 10:21).

One thing necessary or one thing lacking, it all leads to a relationship with Christ, which can only come about through the promptings of the Holy Spirit and will lead us to love the unseen God. There it is, the basic commandment on which all else hangs is about a relationship of three loves. What I write now is simply my own thought in process, not yet finished but glimpsed.

Love of God is what it is, loving the unknown but greater than anything we have, that person who is the source and ending of all things, that light beyond all brightness, journeys end and beginning, home! Love of ourselves is where we discover the reconciling forgiving intimacy with Christ our God and brother and love of neighbour is that delight in the variety and gifts of the Spirit. In the end it seems to me to become very simply. The Trinity is the ultimate dynamic of love in those three aspects of the commandment of love!

Lectio Divina

From Richard Rohr's, The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation.

We certainly want to preserve a sense of transcendent greatness in God.

I know that God is well beyond me, or God would not be any kind of God I could respect. But if this idea of Trinity is the shape of God, and Incarnation is true, then a more honest and truly helpful geometrical figure would be (as we have seen) a circle or even a spiral, and not a pyramid. Let the circle dance rearrange your Christian imagination. No more "old man with a white beard on a throne," please! This Trinitarian flow is like the rise and fall of tides on a shore. All reality can now be pictured as an Infinite Outflowing that empowers and generates an Eternal Infolding. This eternal flow is echoed in history by the Incarnate Christ and the Indwelling Spirit. And as Meister Eckhart and other mystics say in other ways, the infolding always corresponds to the outflowing. (I love the German word for Trinity, Dreifaltigheit, which literally means "the three infoldings.") The foundational good news is that creation and humanity have been drawn into this flow! We are not outsiders or spectators but inherently part of the divine dance. Some mystics who were on real journeys of prayer took this message to its consistent conclusion: creation is thus "the fourth person of the Blessed Trinity"!

Once more, the divine dance isn't a closed circle-we're all invited! As the independent scholar, teacher, and fishing-lure designer C. Baxter Kruger puts it: The stunning truth is that this triune God, in amazing and lavish love, determined to open the circle and share the Trinitarian life with others. This is the one, eternal and abiding reason for the creation of the world and of human life. There is no other God, no other will of God, no second plan, no hidden agenda for human beings. Before the creation of the world, the Father, Son and Spirit set their love upon us and planned to bring us to share and know and experience the Trinitarian life itself. Unto this end the cosmos was called into being, and the human race was fashioned, and Adam and Eve were given a place in the coming of Jesus Christ, the Father's Son himself, in and through whom the dream of our adoption would be accomplished.

This even fits the "dynamic" metaphysical principle that "the interweaving of the three (always) produces a fourth" on another level.

This is the fourth place pictured and reserved as a mirror in Andrei Rublev's fifteenth-century icon of the Trinity - (seen above.)




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