St. Gregory’s Church Woodstock
Sunday, 7 June, 2009, Trinity Sunday
The Rev’d Susan Auchincloss
Today we celebrate the Trinity. Right off the
bat you might not see a connection between Pygmy people and the Trinity.
Nevertheless, I want to tell you a vignette about a group of Pygmies. It is
meant to serve as a kind of angelus bell for the Trinity. About forty years ago
Jean-Pierre Hallet, a Belgian anthropologist, gave a lecture on the Pygmies,
which I attended. From that lecture I now remember one curious fact. When Hallet
took a group of Pigmies out of the rain forest one day, and pointed to a human
figure in the distance, they hooted with delight. Tom Thumb! No, no, Hallet
assured them; this was a full size person, but distance made him seem small. The
Pygmies would not be convinced. He proved his point, of course, by walking
toward the person; but he in turn realized that for those who have never been
able to see further than a few feet, reality appears warped. We'll come back to
this in a few moments.
The doctrine of the Trinity gives us a paradox: God is one, it says; yet God is
also three. Where did we learn this? Not in the Bible, though it does hint at a
tripartite God. Not in basic theology, for how could we assert anything
about that which is beyond our knowing or telling? In fact, the Hebrew Bible
tells us not even to attach a name to God, let alone a description. So,
in short, why has the doctrine of the Trinity not been exposed as sheer,
arrogant fantasy? The answer is: human consciousness.
Again and again we find our consciousness structured in threes. We identify
ourselves as mind, body, and soul. In grammar we divide verbs into first person,
second person, and third person. We name our core values as truth, beauty and
love. And in human development we move from dependence to independence to
interdependence. Trinities such as these cannot be separated, but they can be
distinguished.
Take the trinity of mind, body, and soul. Mind corresponds to God the Father;
body to God the Son; and soul to God the Holy Spirit. Leave any one of the three
out and we are left with a two-legged tripod – a defective foundation for faith.
Think of a night when you found yourself under a clear, starry sky. However
preoccupied you may have been, you cannot help but stop and look up, transfixed.
How small you feel, insignificant even! Our minds cannot grasp such astronomical
distances, much less the concept of infinity. These are God the Father moments,
moments when we approach God with the mind – third person moments, when we look
on God as an impersonal 'It' in the terrain of truth. Speaking developmentally,
this corresponds to the dependent phase of our growth: God is Other, I feel the
distance between us, and how totally I depend on God for my existence.
We are more than mind, however, more than truth seekers. Think of the friend who
was there for you when the bottom fell out. When I had the accident to my hand I
did not realize people really cared for me. Yet to this day, when I remember how
many, many friends turned up with casseroles or sent cards, or visited, or
phoned, I can start to cry all over again. It went on for months! These are God
the Son moments, moments when we find ourselves heart to heart with God,
encircled in God's arms of mercy. These are second person moments, taking place
in the terrain of love and compassion. We no longer feel dependent, but
independent, able to relate to God the Son from our own base of self, person to
person, in a dance of mutual embrace.
Finally, we are more than mind and body. Few would disagree with me about mind
and body, but soul? What evidence do we have of a human soul? I read once that
scientists had carefully weighed a body at the time of death to see if they
could detect any change, indicating that the soul had departed. As you can
guess, the experiment “proved” what they expected – no soul. But what is the
weight of joy? Of meaning? Of integrity? The soul ties us to eternity. Think of
those fleeting moments when an uncanny awareness creeps over you – not a
thought, but a bedrock certainty – that you are one with all that is. These are
Holy Spirit moments, when deep peace claims you and it has nothing to do with
your current circumstances. I call these first person moments. We say, “I”, yet
it is not ego speaking, but a self that knows no boundaries. If mind lives in
the terrain of truth and body in the terrain of love, soul lives in the terrain
of beauty. Developmentally we have reached a stage of interdependence.
When it comes to the Trinity we are not so much making a claim about God, but
about ourselves as trinitarian beings. We require the Trinity in order to
worship with the whole of ourselves. Sounds reasonable, you say, but how do we
make this practical? Remember the Pygmies. We can scarcely imagine life in so
dense a jungle that our eyesight never reaches beyond, say, a ten yard line. Yet
isn't that typically the extent of our interior vision? Not leaves,
vines, and tree trunks, of course, but plans, worries, lists, hopes, fears, and
sometimes regrets flutter in front of our eyes. They cut off the long view, the
view of God.
We could say that religion exists to bring us back to the long view. Coming to
church for Sunday worship opens up a clearing in the jungle. It gives us space
and time to draw breath and pay attention to what has lain hidden behind the
mental foliage. The liturgy leads us into the clearing in a trinitarian way. We
enter the church and face the altar, the symbol of sacrifice to God the Father.
The opening hymn is likely to have a triumphal, magisterial tone, as if God were
distant. “God the Omnipotent! King who ordainest thunder thy clarion, the
lightening thy sword....” The readings follow, also speaking to the mind, as
does the Creed.
With the Prayers of the People we shift to the body, and to the second person.
God becomes You. Our relationship comes to the fore. We pray for every bodily
concern: help for sickness, hunger, peace and justice, or any kind of need,
remembering Jesus' words, “Whatever you do unto the least of these you do unto
me.” The confession then takes us into deep intimacy in the I-Thou relationship.
Exchanging the peace is all about the you-dimension of worship, loving Christ in
each other.
The offertory marks the turning point from you to I, from the body to the soul,
from love to beauty. In the Great Thanksgiving Prayer we relive the last supper,
not as observers, but as participants. We become Christ, we become the bread, we
become the wine. Being one with Christ, we offer ourselves to God. In the
communion we enter that mystery where there is no longer an I and a You, no
longer an I and an It; no longer even an I. We let go and allow ourselves to be
swept up in the mystic presence. The music has a contemplative tone: “Breathe on
me breath of God, fill me with life anew....”
The prayer after communion brings us back to our heads and our hearts, as we try
to frame with words what just happened, and we give thanks for it. The final
hymn has a tone of renewal and rejoicing. It goes without saying that all sides
of the Trinity make themselves felt in all parts of the liturgy. If it were
otherwise, liturgical worship would turn sterile. Also, it scarcely needs saying
that coming to church is not the only way to worship, though it does remind us
that worship needs to be balanced, like a tripod on three legs.
Let me bring this all together now. First, we may take it as given that human
beings are made to worship. Without worship we become less than human. Next, the
doctrine of the Trinity exists to help us worship with the whole of our being –
mind, body, and soul. Finally, the detail about the Pygmies is meant, like an
angelus bell, to remind us that preoccupations can conceal the long view; or to
put it another way, keep us from remembering our context – that in God “we live
and move and have our being.” In addition, the Pygmies remind us that unless we
do take the long view, and a three-way view, God can become a Tom Thumb god for
us: quaint, perhaps, endearing even, but nothing to build a faith around,
nothing to build a life around, nothing to turn to when lightening strikes.
Let us not end on a cautionary note. Let us rejoice, instead, that in the
doctrine of the Trinity we have a treasure. It may not be spelled out in so many
words in the Bible, and yet the Bible does give us hints. Take the prophet
Isaiah, whom we heard just now. Surely it was no mere rhetorical device when he
wrote, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God of Hosts.” We could make that our
mantra: holy, holy, holy.