Last week I was on retreat with the affiliates of the Order of Julian of Norwich, an Episcopal monastery in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Over the weekend the monks and nuns of the Order joined us, and at worship they sang the psalms in Gregorian chants, which wafted in and through us, like the Holy Spirit itself in motion.
For Saturday’s Eucharist, Sister Cornelia, a somewhat aged nun with a clear and lovely singing voice, offered the homily. She’d recently had a medical diagnosis that had frightened her. Sister Cornelia, who has been a nun for decades and who prays multiple times daily, told us, of course, she thought she’d turn straight to God, in whom she fully trusts. But, did she? No, said Sister Cornelia, she turned straight to Google.
And, in a roundabout way, that got me thinking about the Trinity, the whole idea of a relational connectedness among all that is, rather like Google itself, as it spirals at warp seed around the planet.
In today’s reading from Genesis we hear how God created the heavens and the earth, and then “saw everything he had made, and indeed it was very good.”
Astronomers and physicists now have a staggering amount of information about our ever expanding universe. We’ve all been blessed to see the amazing photos from the Hubble telescope. It’s now thought that there are 500 million planets just in our Milky Way galaxy, and it is statistically likely that at least a few will be able to support life. We know that planets, galaxies, and stars continually are moving about in orbit. They move and flow in relationship to one another, and it is in the flow itself where we find life. The energy in the universe is in the ever-evolving relationship between the planets, stars and galaxies.
It is safe to say that we live in a relational universe, a constant flow of giving and receiving, and all we have to do is to allow it.
Today is Trinity Sunday, and for some obscure reason it is your Deacon who seems always to be the homilist on Trinity Sunday, and so I’m the one invited to explain to you the foundational doctrine of our entire belief system.
And so, I invite you into the loving flow of all that is: “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.”
For years my simplest understanding of the Trinity was that God is above us, Jesus is with us, and the Holy Spirit is in us. But there’s a basic fallacy here: we now know, scientifically, that God is not above us. The universe is not in the shape of a pyramid, with God at the tippity-top point. The universe is a wondrous swirl of stars, galaxies, and planets. So, I would invite you to imagine God as being the very dance itself, encompassing all that is, and the Trinity is the totally unhindered flow of life. Imagine the Trinity as a circular dance of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and we people are in the dance, the loving flow of life itself.
The psalmist today, in Psalm 8, written around 2500 years ago, asks the key cosmic question:
“When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars you have set in their courses,
What is man that you should be mindful of him?
The son of man that you should seek him out?”
In Genesis God creates all that is in physical form. The Son of God, Jesus, incarnates in human form, and by extension, in each of us, as an individual. And, God is in all consciousness, as the ever moving, ever blowing, ever guiding Holy Spirit. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, are in an eternal dance, encompassing all that is. It becomes our essential human task to enter, and to stay in, this healing, profoundly good, and wondrous flow of love. It’s a communion of mutuality.
Sadly, it is very simple and even tempting for us to block that flow of love---by hardening our hearts, or by putting someone in a box of ‘I don’t like that person” and cutting them off from us, and thereby cutting ourselves off, from the flow of love. We constrict the flow of love, all the time, without even thinking about it. We do it when we feel hurt, or angry, or overwhelmed and want to just go off and be alone in our little independent hermitage and not have anything to do with anybody, at least for a while. We did this as children, and we do it as adults, thought perhaps in subtler and more hidden ways.
I’d say that the very clearest and most helpful rendering of the Trinity, as a healing flow of love between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, came, a few years back, in a wildly popular book. The book was The Shack, a Christian novel by Canadian author William Young, a former office manager and hotel night clerk, and it was self-published in 2007. The Shack became the #1 Paperback trade fiction seller on the New York Times best seller list from June 2008 to early 2010. As I recall, when the Christ Church book group discussed The Shack, we had the largest gathering ever to discuss a book.
Now, I don’t actually recommend you go read The Shack. It has quite a dark plot line. The central figure has experienced a deep tragedy, and he is feeling lost, angry, and very hurt. God invites him to for a visit at ‘the shack’. Now, here is where we encounter the marvelous healing flow of the Trinity in action, the flow of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, which enfolds and begins to heal this wounded human being.
God the Father, in The Shack, is a warm, loving and large African American woman,
who always is cooking marvelous and ample meals of total abundance. God the Son is a
gentle handyman, always available to walk and talk, a loving and completely understanding companion on the journey. God the Holy Spirit is like a wind sprite, a delicate Asian woman who flits about, rather like a human Tinkerbell, and she has a genius for cultivating a beautiful wild flower garden. These three live in an ongoing dance of perfect giving and receiving, of expressing love in relationship. Being in the midst of that flow of love is profoundly affirming and healing, for the central figure in the book. If this trio existed in real life, the shack would be a wildly popular retreat destination.
Our faith tells us this trio does exist in real life, in the form of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, ever moving in the Trinity. We only need to enter into the flow. We only need to say yes to life, and not block off any of our loving energy by negating others, or cutting them off from being in relationship with us, or holding onto hurts and thoughts of vengeance. Now, that’s a high bar for any of us, not ever to stop the mutuality of flowing love. Perhaps a saint might live at that altitude.
But, we can give it a good try. At a wedding I attended last weekend, there was a cute little birdcage you could slip your written suggestions in, as to how, this young couple could have a happy marriage. My anonymous suggestions were two: “Never go to bed angry” and “Be one another’s best friend”. Now, thinking about those two simple suggestions, in the context of the Trinity, it’s all about not stopping the flow of loving mutuality.
In closing, I invite you to be, and to stay, in loving communion with one another, and then, I dare to say, that the entire universe may move a teeny little bit forward in being a totally unhindered and benevolent flow of life.
