Reflections on the Holy Trinity: June 7, 2020
Today is the Feast of the Holy Trinity in the wider Western Church – a Sunday set aside for us to contemplate, but not necessarily comprehend, the wisdom of loving God as Three in One and One in Three – because to ponder the Trinity is to become a theological poet. Or an artist or dancer rather than an engineer of fact-checker – women, men, and children at peace with mystery and paradox – in a world addicted to exactitude and certainty. The Eastern Orthodox Church teaches that honoring God as Trinity is a dance that moves us between contemplation – the inward journey – and action – the outward journey. It is a willingness to give up binary thinking and feel the presence of the holy in our hearts and world as we then try, ever so tentatively, to give tender expression to those feelings, knowing all the while that whatever happens will always be incomplete. For how can the finite ever define the infinite? Poet, Mary Oliver, says:
Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous to be understood.
How grass can be nourishing in the mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever in allegiance with gravity
while we ourselves dream of rising.
How two hands touch and the bonds will never be broken.
How people come, from delight or the scars of damage,
to the comfort of a poem.
Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers.
Let me keep company always with those who say “Look!”
Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers.
Let me keep company always with those who say “Look!”
and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.
The Scriptures for today whisper hints of what it might mean to experience the holy as Trinity, while never fully articulating a complete solution to our conundrum. Our liturgical tradition asks us to start with words from Genesis suggesting that God is simultaneously Creator and Spirit: the source of all creativity:
In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, until the breath from God swept over the face of the waters. God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light - and God saw that the light was good; so God separated the light from the darkness – calling the light Day, and the darkness Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
Next we’re encouraged to share the ancient Psalmist’s song that reveres God’s majesty in creation even as it conjures awe within our souls:
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God and crowned them with glory and honor. You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet.
Finally, we’re asked to lift-up the closing words from St. Matthew’s gospel where the resurrected but still wounded Jesus confers a blessing and a responsibility upon his friends saying:
All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.
Now, I am down with all of these words: I love them and wrestle with them knowing that NONE of them tells me precisely what God as Trinity means, ok? Theologians and scholars agree that this was the case in the early church which for 300 years often spoke of God as Holy Trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – yet never once tried to define what that meant. After all, there were a host of other names for the divine that were equally useful in a mystical musical manner.
· Do you recall the defining hymn of the Advent season: O Come, O Come Emmanuel? It uses seven of the early holy names for the sacred: including Sapientia – Wisdom – Adonai – Lord – Radix Jesse – Root of Jesse (King David’s father) – Oriens – dayspring – Rex Gentium – King of the nations – and Emmanuel – God who is with us.
· Other names for the holy include: Sophia – Lady Wisdom – Logos – Word of God – Father and Mother of Comfort – Abba – Advocate – Almighty One – the Beginning and the End – Bread of Life – Morning Star – Good Shepherd – Deliverer – Rock of My Salvation – and on and on.
It wasn’t until the middle of the fourth century that both the Roman Emperor Constantine, who wanted to bring uniformity to a very diverse church that was now the new state religion, and a variety of Eastern clergy, who wanted some shared creedal clarity about the nature of Jesus, set in motion a process of defining the Holy Trinity. The emperor didn’t give two hoots about theology. He just wanted a template for shaping the new religion as it grew throughout his domain. And the Eastern Orthodox clergy were trying to nail down a working understanding as to whether Jesus was human or holy or both? Of the same essence as the Father or something different? Both/and, some combination of each, or none of the above? The Western Church didn’t get into the fray until the 5th century of the Common Era with the writing of St. Augustine; so, for nearly two hundred years the Eastern Church experimented and argued and explored ways to clarify what they meant whenever speaking of God as Trinity. And, what they concluded was pure genius: they concluded that the Trinity could never be fully defined – with words.
· All doctrine, the Eastern Church concluded, must always remain provisional – more a process of feeling the holy in our hearts and spending time with that feeling in contemplation – than clear, objective facts. After all God is greater than our ability to control or comprehend, consequently silence is more appropriate than sound.
· And while those who shaped our early creeds still utilized words, they used them with precision, knowing that the ineffable can only be considered evocatively, symbolically – their term was simulacrum – a verbal clue of a deeper truth that could never be fully contained in any form.
Which is to say: poetry. To speak of God as Father, Son, Holy Spirit – or Creator, Redeemer, and Comforter – or Source, Savior, and Sustainer – is heart language, not head talk. It is art, not science. The words of the church’s early creeds point to a relationship with the sacred, an experience within, that can be manifest outwardly as activity in the world, albeit always imperfectly. The words shall be beautiful and none are complete. They summarize what Mary Oliver prayed in her poem: Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have answers. And let me keep company always with those who says, Look! And laugh in astonishment – and bow their heads. Karen Armstrong writes in her magnificent, A History of God, that, “The Trinity was to remind Christians that the reality we called God could be experienced but never fully grasped by the human intellect.”
The Trinity was not to be interpreted in a literal manner, it was not an abstruse scientific theory (to be proven), but… ultimately a mystical or spiritual experience that had to be lived, not thought, because God went far beyond human concepts. It was not a logical or intellectual formulation, but an imaginative paradigm that confounded reason. (Armstrong)
To know the divine as Trinity is to encounter some of the limitless ways the holy touches our lives. Sadly, in the West, Father, Son and Holy Spirit became a calcified doctrine when it was always meant to be a poem. My tradition offers a modest corrective by speaking of our “testimonies of faith” rather than insisting upon theological tests to determine who is pure enough to pass the entrance exam for church. Church. Testimonies are stories about how we have personally experienced the sacred: they are deeply intimate insights, songs, poems, and statements born of the heart.
While tests… well, tests lead to Inquisitions – and torture – and a God of love who is turned into a tyrant of fear. So, to be a part of the rehabilitation and even the re-enchantment of the Holy Trinity in the West, I would like to suggest three, inter-related areas we might reclaim a healthy, mysterious, mystical, playful, healing, healthy, sensual, spiritual, and poetic relationship with the Holy Trinity. Specifically, I wonder what our experiences, our encounter with culture, and our art might already be telling us about the bounty of the divine within and among us? You see, I have come to believe that every person – atheists and agnostics, Democrats and Republicans, women, men, and children – all have all had some encounter with the holy. We may use different words to describe what we’ve felt – some are joyful, some filled with fear, some are beautiful and others broken and cruel – still our lives have something to tell us about the sacred that we need to know. Frederick Buechner is helpful here:
There is no event so commonplace but that God is present within it, always hiddenly, always leaving you room to recognize him (or her) or not to recognize, too, but all the more fascinatingly because of that, all the more compellingly and hauntingly… If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments – and life itself is grace.
This in an invitation to open ourselves to the Holy Trinity in our ordinary, everyday realities. The medieval mystic, Meister Eckhart, used to teach that “reality is the will of God –it can always be better – but we must start with what is real.” 12 Step groups say much the same thing in the Serenity Prayer: deep rest and peace are the fruit of accepting what is true in real life. No magical thinking here. The first Bible passage I ever memorized was St. Paul’s insight about this in Romans 12:
So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for the Lord. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what God wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. (Peterson, The Message, Romans 12)
I wonder, then, what this moment in history is asking or telling us? Have there been times when you’ve been frightened? I have – frightened for myself as an old white guy over 65 in this time of contagion, frightened for my beloved who has breathing troubles, terrified for my grand-children should they or their sweet parents become ill. I’ve found a lot of fear alive inside me, a ton of fear, alongside a lot of love as well. I wonder what has changed for you during the plague. How have you experienced judgement? Or been called into a new level of solidarity? What are you learning about the integration of prayer and social justice these days? Or compassion for the most vulnerable among us? Have you used this time of sheltering in place to grow in contemplation? Or rest? Or lament? Or all of the above? Our experience with reality – personally and inwardly as well as socially and externally – is one of the ways we renew intimacy with God as Holy Trinity.
· Sacred awe is one of the ways I get a handle on this. The first time I stood on the rim of the Grand Canyon with my young daughters and tried to take in the magnitude of what I was seeing, I was overwhelmed. It was literally hard to breathe given the enormity – the beauty – the fullness along with the emptiness – simply staggering. My youngest daughter, who had just received her first camera, took maybe 75 pictures in a row of the canyon. When we got the film back – which tells you how long ago this was – at first we just laughed because there seemed to be almost no difference in any of the 75 photos. But then we realized that they were a visual prayer. She, like we, had been overcome with awe – and beauty – fear and the enormity of the canyon as well as what it said of God’s greatness.
· I confess I had much the same reaction while helping to bring to both of my two daughters into this world during their births at home: seeing them emerge from within their momma’s body, cradling their tiny heads as they crowned, and then sliding their flesh into my trembling hands before they nursed was a holy/human moment of such deep awe that continues to shape who I am 40+ years later.
But let’s not be simply sentimental as we celebrate the beauty and majesty of the holy: the Holy Trinity is just as present in our suffering and grief as in our joys and blessings. I’ve told you before that I regularly weep when praying over the evening news – and I know you do, too. Watching that agonizing 8 minutes and 46 second execution of George Floyd grabbed me by the throat and shook something awake inside of me with a ferocity and sorrow that I know was of the Lord. It has ignited something throughout the world, too awakening in us God’s call into the Beloved Community.
Valarie Kaur of the Revolutionary Love Project has helped me understand that all our experiences of rage, grief, fear, numbness, tears, and confusion are part of how we live into the holy in history. She notes that in 2020 there are more of us out in the streets in this uprising for justice for black and brown people than in 1968 or 1992. She writes: “Never before in our shared history have so many non-black people of color and white allies, young people, and local leaders exercised their voice to say: Black lives matter and we are united in calling out the centrality of anti-black racism in America.” She is clear that this is God’s voice sounding within our own. “As we let our grief into our hearts…” she continues, “we learn how to fight for those who need us. As we honor our rage… we encounter connections to the wider world that brings creativity to birth in ways we could never imagine.”
Like birthing itself, she concludes, this moment is teaching us how to push and breathe and trust our way into the Beloved Community even in the middle of our doubts and fears. The late Robert Kennedy, speaking to an Indianapolis crowd of mostly black and brown people from the back of a truck on the eve of Dr. King’s assassination was guided by Holy Spirit wisdom when he told the crowd that while he came from privilege and whiteness, he knew something of the agony of that night, too. Because his own brother had been gunned down just like Dr. King. After a pause, Kennedy added: “My favorite poet was Aeschylus who wrote, ‘In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.’”
So, first, our experiences – our testimonies – our stories of how we have met and encountered the sacred are part of what it means to know God as Holy Trinity. These stories recognize the life-changing presence of God within and among us. They honor the diversity of our experiences and help us see that because we all have them, we must live into a love that locks NO ONE out of God’s embrace. For from within the fullness of our lives – our joys and sorrows, celebrations and sufferings, brutalities, boredom, brokenness and blessing – God’s presence has been revealed within our flesh. That’s part of the blessing of living into the Holy Trinity.
Another takes place whenever we practice an upside-down cultural critique born of holy humility. If we have eyes to see the holy – and are awake – than we can see that even our most convoluted and wounded habits and institutions are still speaking to us of a shared hunger for the sacred. This hit me some 20 years ago during Advent in Arizona. For the longest time I had been a pretty ridid guy when it came to observing the RIGHT spirituality for the season: there could be no Christmas carols until Christmas Eve, none of the glitz and gluttony of the shopping mall, and a thorough rejection of all the holiday displays that would show up in grocery stores weeks before… Wait for it.. before what? Before Halloween.
It was revolting to me – so much so that what I taught about Advent was pretty damned heavy-handed and humorless considering it was the celebration of Christ’s birth, right? But one evening, and I can’t tell you exactly why, I found myself driving to one of those sacreligious shopping malls. And as I wandered around taking in the lights and the decorations, the busyness and buzzing energy of the crowds, and all that music, I had an epiphany: I may detest the commercialization of Christ’s birth, but guess what? It’s not all about me. Something real is taking place here and it comes from a holy longing deep within us all. So quit carping and start celebrating. I almost burst into tears of joy as a I walked around that mall singing Christmas carols out loud and taking in all that beautiful excess and light and hope: thanks be to God Ebenezer Scrooge had left the house! And isn’t that at the heart of the Christmas story? Finding the Christ Child, a small gift from God, in the most unlikely and unexpected place?
Sometime later, it dawned on me that the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, had a similar revelation once while running errands in downtown Louisville for his monastery. He put it like this: In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly over-whelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I was theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renuncia-tion and supposed holiness… This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud… I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. (Merton)
Advent in a glitzy shopping mall gobsmacked me, downtown Louisville at rush hour did it for Merton, so what’s it been for you? How have you been surprised by grace? When have you discovered that you are a part of the great, broken, joy-filled and confused community of God – and realized we’re all in this together? I’ve come up with a short prayer to help me cut to the chase: When, O Lord, am I being a hard-ass – and what must I do to quit it?! Like a spiritual director once told me: never put whipped cream on BS, man. So, from time to time I try to pray: when, O Lord, have I been a hard-ass? The ancient rabbis sometimes played with today’s psalm connecting it with Job 7: the wise and humble soul, they taught, carried two scriptures in different pockets. In one was the verse: What are humans that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made us just a little lower than the angels. In the other: Remember that Thou wast taken from dust and to dust ye shall return.
Being able to laugh at ourselves with grace, take a break from being the center of the universe as we let humility ripen, and simply celebrate that we KNOW life is NOT all about us… is another part of how we live into the Holy Trinity. The old gospel hymn tells us: it’s not the preacher, or the deacon, but it’s me O Lord… standin’ in the need of prayer. Last summer for my birthday, David Bromberg added: it’s not the rabbi, nor the mullah but it’s ME O Lord…
And that brings me to the gift our artists offer in living into the Holy Trinity. I’m partial to their contribution, I know, because I am a musician, but it is still true. Walter Brueggemann, wise scholar of the Hebrew scriptures and Christian theology, teaches that the prophets of ancient Israel realized they had three essential tasks. First, they were called by God to warn the people that built into the rhythm of creation were consequences for living lives of self-absorbed greed and over consumption. Sometimes we say that what goes around, comes around – and the prophets were clear that bigotry, violence, avarice, and willful ignorance all lead to natural disasters and social collapse.
Second, as so often happens then and now, when people choose to ignore the cries of the prophet – and experience the devastating
and bow their heads.
The Scriptures for today whisper hints of what it might mean to experience the holy as Trinity, while never fully articulating a complete solution to our conundrum. Our liturgical tradition asks us to start with words from Genesis suggesting that God is simultaneously Creator and Spirit: the source of all creativity:
In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, until the breath from God swept over the face of the waters. God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light - and God saw that the light was good; so God separated the light from the darkness – calling the light Day, and the darkness Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
Next we’re encouraged to share the ancient Psalmist’s song that reveres God’s majesty in creation even as it conjures awe within our souls:
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God and crowned them with glory and honor. You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet.
Finally, we’re asked to lift-up the closing words from St. Matthew’s gospel where the resurrected but still wounded Jesus confers a blessing and a responsibility upon his friends saying:
All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.
Now, I am down with all of these words: I love them and wrestle with them knowing that NONE of them tells me precisely what God as Trinity means, ok? Theologians and scholars agree that this was the case in the early church which for 300 years often spoke of God as Holy Trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – yet never once tried to define what that meant. After all, there were a host of other names for the divine that were equally useful in a mystical musical manner.
· Do you recall the defining hymn of the Advent season: O Come, O Come Emmanuel? It uses seven of the early holy names for the sacred: including Sapientia – Wisdom – Adonai – Lord – Radix Jesse – Root of Jesse (King David’s father) – Oriens – dayspring – Rex Gentium – King of the nations – and Emmanuel – God who is with us.
· Other names for the holy include: Sophia – Lady Wisdom – Logos – Word of God – Father and Mother of Comfort – Abba – Advocate – Almighty One – the Beginning and the End – Bread of Life – Morning Star – Good Shepherd – Deliverer – Rock of My Salvation – and on and on.
It wasn’t until the middle of the fourth century that both the Roman Emperor Constantine, who wanted to bring uniformity to a very diverse church that was now the new state religion, and a variety of Eastern clergy, who wanted some shared creedal clarity about the nature of Jesus, set in motion a process of defining the Holy Trinity. The emperor didn’t give two hoots about theology. He just wanted a template for shaping the new religion as it grew throughout his domain. And the Eastern Orthodox clergy were trying to nail down a working understanding as to whether Jesus was human or holy or both? Of the same essence as the Father or something different? Both/and, some combination of each, or none of the above? The Western Church didn’t get into the fray until the 5th century of the Common Era with the writing of St. Augustine; so, for nearly two hundred years the Eastern Church experimented and argued and explored ways to clarify what they meant whenever speaking of God as Trinity. And, what they concluded was pure genius: they concluded that the Trinity could never be fully defined – with words.
· All doctrine, the Eastern Church concluded, must always remain provisional – more a process of feeling the holy in our hearts and spending time with that feeling in contemplation – than clear, objective facts. After all God is greater than our ability to control or comprehend, consequently silence is more appropriate than sound.
· And while those who shaped our early creeds still utilized words, they used them with precision, knowing that the ineffable can only be considered evocatively, symbolically – their term was simulacrum – a verbal clue of a deeper truth that could never be fully contained in any form.
Which is to say: poetry. To speak of God as Father, Son, Holy Spirit – or Creator, Redeemer, and Comforter – or Source, Savior, and Sustainer – is heart language, not head talk. It is art, not science. The words of the church’s early creeds point to a relationship with the sacred, an experience within, that can be manifest outwardly as activity in the world, albeit always imperfectly. The words shall be beautiful and none are complete. They summarize what Mary Oliver prayed in her poem: Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have answers. And let me keep company always with those who says, Look! And laugh in astonishment – and bow their heads. Karen Armstrong writes in her magnificent, A History of God, that, “The Trinity was to remind Christians that the reality we called God could be experienced but never fully grasped by the human intellect.”
The Trinity was not to be interpreted in a literal manner, it was not an abstruse scientific theory (to be proven), but… ultimately a mystical or spiritual experience that had to be lived, not thought, because God went far beyond human concepts. It was not a logical or intellectual formulation, but an imaginative paradigm that confounded reason. (Armstrong)
To know the divine as Trinity is to encounter some of the limitless ways the holy touches our lives. Sadly, in the West, Father, Son and Holy Spirit became a calcified doctrine when it was always meant to be a poem. My tradition offers a modest corrective by speaking of our “testimonies of faith” rather than insisting upon theological tests to determine who is pure enough to pass the entrance exam for church. Church. Testimonies are stories about how we have personally experienced the sacred: they are deeply intimate insights, songs, poems, and statements born of the heart.
While tests… well, tests lead to Inquisitions – and torture – and a God of love who is turned into a tyrant of fear. So, to be a part of the rehabilitation and even the re-enchantment of the Holy Trinity in the West, I would like to suggest three, inter-related areas we might reclaim a healthy, mysterious, mystical, playful, healing, healthy, sensual, spiritual, and poetic relationship with the Holy Trinity. Specifically, I wonder what our experiences, our encounter with culture, and our art might already be telling us about the bounty of the divine within and among us? You see, I have come to believe that every person – atheists and agnostics, Democrats and Republicans, women, men, and children – all have all had some encounter with the holy. We may use different words to describe what we’ve felt – some are joyful, some filled with fear, some are beautiful and others broken and cruel – still our lives have something to tell us about the sacred that we need to know. Frederick Buechner is helpful here:
There is no event so commonplace but that God is present within it, always hiddenly, always leaving you room to recognize him (or her) or not to recognize, too, but all the more fascinatingly because of that, all the more compellingly and hauntingly… If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments – and life itself is grace.
This in an invitation to open ourselves to the Holy Trinity in our ordinary, everyday realities. The medieval mystic, Meister Eckhart, used to teach that “reality is the will of God –it can always be better – but we must start with what is real.” 12 Step groups say much the same thing in the Serenity Prayer: deep rest and peace are the fruit of accepting what is true in real life. No magical thinking here. The first Bible passage I ever memorized was St. Paul’s insight about this in Romans 12:
So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for the Lord. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what God wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. (Peterson, The Message, Romans 12)
I wonder, then, what this moment in history is asking or telling us? Have there been times when you’ve been frightened? I have – frightened for myself as an old white guy over 65 in this time of contagion, frightened for my beloved who has breathing troubles, terrified for my grand-children should they or their sweet parents become ill. I’ve found a lot of fear alive inside me, a ton of fear, alongside a lot of love as well. I wonder what has changed for you during the plague. How have you experienced judgement? Or been called into a new level of solidarity? What are you learning about the integration of prayer and social justice these days? Or compassion for the most vulnerable among us? Have you used this time of sheltering in place to grow in contemplation? Or rest? Or lament? Or all of the above? Our experience with reality – personally and inwardly as well as socially and externally – is one of the ways we renew intimacy with God as Holy Trinity.
· Sacred awe is one of the ways I get a handle on this. The first time I stood on the rim of the Grand Canyon with my young daughters and tried to take in the magnitude of what I was seeing, I was overwhelmed. It was literally hard to breathe given the enormity – the beauty – the fullness along with the emptiness – simply staggering. My youngest daughter, who had just received her first camera, took maybe 75 pictures in a row of the canyon. When we got the film back – which tells you how long ago this was – at first we just laughed because there seemed to be almost no difference in any of the 75 photos. But then we realized that they were a visual prayer. She, like we, had been overcome with awe – and beauty – fear and the enormity of the canyon as well as what it said of God’s greatness.
· I confess I had much the same reaction while helping to bring to both of my two daughters into this world during their births at home: seeing them emerge from within their momma’s body, cradling their tiny heads as they crowned, and then sliding their flesh into my trembling hands before they nursed was a holy/human moment of such deep awe that continues to shape who I am 40+ years later.
But let’s not be simply sentimental as we celebrate the beauty and majesty of the holy: the Holy Trinity is just as present in our suffering and grief as in our joys and blessings. I’ve told you before that I regularly weep when praying over the evening news – and I know you do, too. Watching that agonizing 8 minutes and 46 second execution of George Floyd grabbed me by the throat and shook something awake inside of me with a ferocity and sorrow that I know was of the Lord. It has ignited something throughout the world, too awakening in us God’s call into the Beloved Community.
Valarie Kaur of the Revolutionary Love Project has helped me understand that all our experiences of rage, grief, fear, numbness, tears, and confusion are part of how we live into the holy in history. She notes that in 2020 there are more of us out in the streets in this uprising for justice for black and brown people than in 1968 or 1992. She writes: “Never before in our shared history have so many non-black people of color and white allies, young people, and local leaders exercised their voice to say: Black lives matter and we are united in calling out the centrality of anti-black racism in America.” She is clear that this is God’s voice sounding within our own. “As we let our grief into our hearts…” she continues, “we learn how to fight for those who need us. As we honor our rage… we encounter connections to the wider world that brings creativity to birth in ways we could never imagine.”
Like birthing itself, she concludes, this moment is teaching us how to push and breathe and trust our way into the Beloved Community even in the middle of our doubts and fears. The late Robert Kennedy, speaking to an Indianapolis crowd of mostly black and brown people from the back of a truck on the eve of Dr. King’s assassination was guided by Holy Spirit wisdom when he told the crowd that while he came from privilege and whiteness, he knew something of the agony of that night, too. Because his own brother had been gunned down just like Dr. King. After a pause, Kennedy added: “My favorite poet was Aeschylus who wrote, ‘In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.’”
So, first, our experiences – our testimonies – our stories of how we have met and encountered the sacred are part of what it means to know God as Holy Trinity. These stories recognize the life-changing presence of God within and among us. They honor the diversity of our experiences and help us see that because we all have them, we must live into a love that locks NO ONE out of God’s embrace. For from within the fullness of our lives – our joys and sorrows, celebrations and sufferings, brutalities, boredom, brokenness and blessing – God’s presence has been revealed within our flesh. That’s part of the blessing of living into the Holy Trinity.
Another takes place whenever we practice an upside-down cultural critique born of holy humility. If we have eyes to see the holy – and are awake – than we can see that even our most convoluted and wounded habits and institutions are still speaking to us of a shared hunger for the sacred. This hit me some 20 years ago during Advent in Arizona. For the longest time I had been a pretty ridid guy when it came to observing the RIGHT spirituality for the season: there could be no Christmas carols until Christmas Eve, none of the glitz and gluttony of the shopping mall, and a thorough rejection of all the holiday displays that would show up in grocery stores weeks before… Wait for it.. before what? Before Halloween.
It was revolting to me – so much so that what I taught about Advent was pretty damned heavy-handed and humorless considering it was the celebration of Christ’s birth, right? But one evening, and I can’t tell you exactly why, I found myself driving to one of those sacreligious shopping malls. And as I wandered around taking in the lights and the decorations, the busyness and buzzing energy of the crowds, and all that music, I had an epiphany: I may detest the commercialization of Christ’s birth, but guess what? It’s not all about me. Something real is taking place here and it comes from a holy longing deep within us all. So quit carping and start celebrating. I almost burst into tears of joy as a I walked around that mall singing Christmas carols out loud and taking in all that beautiful excess and light and hope: thanks be to God Ebenezer Scrooge had left the house! And isn’t that at the heart of the Christmas story? Finding the Christ Child, a small gift from God, in the most unlikely and unexpected place?
Sometime later, it dawned on me that the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, had a similar revelation once while running errands in downtown Louisville for his monastery. He put it like this: In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly over-whelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I was theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renuncia-tion and supposed holiness… This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud… I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. (Merton)
Advent in a glitzy shopping mall gobsmacked me, downtown Louisville at rush hour did it for Merton, so what’s it been for you? How have you been surprised by grace? When have you discovered that you are a part of the great, broken, joy-filled and confused community of God – and realized we’re all in this together? I’ve come up with a short prayer to help me cut to the chase: When, O Lord, am I being a hard-ass – and what must I do to quit it?! Like a spiritual director once told me: never put whipped cream on BS, man. So, from time to time I try to pray: when, O Lord, have I been a hard-ass? The ancient rabbis sometimes played with today’s psalm connecting it with Job 7: the wise and humble soul, they taught, carried two scriptures in different pockets. In one was the verse: What are humans that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made us just a little lower than the angels. In the other: Remember that Thou wast taken from dust and to dust ye shall return.
Being able to laugh at ourselves with grace, take a break from being the center of the universe as we let humility ripen, and simply celebrate that we KNOW life is NOT all about us… is another part of how we live into the Holy Trinity. The old gospel hymn tells us: it’s not the preacher, or the deacon, but it’s me O Lord… standin’ in the need of prayer. Last summer for my birthday, David Bromberg added: it’s not the rabbi, nor the mullah but it’s ME O Lord…
And that brings me to the gift our artists offer in living into the Holy Trinity. I’m partial to their contribution, I know, because I am a musician, but it is still true. Walter Brueggemann, wise scholar of the Hebrew scriptures and Christian theology, teaches that the prophets of ancient Israel realized they had three essential tasks. First, they were called by God to warn the people that built into the rhythm of creation were consequences for living lives of self-absorbed greed and over consumption. Sometimes we say that what goes around, comes around – and the prophets were clear that bigotry, violence, avarice, and willful ignorance all lead to natural disasters and social collapse.
Second, as so often happens then and now, when people choose to ignore the cries of the prophet – and experience the devastating
consequences of selfishness through drought, famine, flood, war, tumult and exile – the prophet’s job changes: once there was a time for warning and repentance, but when that season ended, it became a time for mourning. Lament. Grieving. The prophets were explicit: until the broken own their complicity and recognize how their privilege wounds everyone, nothing will heal. Hearts will remain hard, divisions will intensify, and shalom – right relations between neighbors and nature – will be elusive. It seems that hard-hearts can only make room for grace if they were broken and then broken open. Jesus said in his time: O Jerusalem, Jerusalem: who kills the prophets and stones the peace-makers. How I longed to gather your children together like a mother hen gathers her chicks, but you were not willing. O that you knew the things that made for peace. During the seasons of suffering, the prophets became relentless advocates for the practice of lamentation.
And then, at a time of God’s choosing not ours, when everyone feels as if despair is eternal, hope is introduced through a culture’s artists through what has been called the prophetic imagination. It is not something politicians understand – nor is it the purview of bureaucrats or ideologues how God brings hope to a grieving people through its artists – but it is time-tested and true. Bureaucrats defund the arts in our schools and politicians manipulate creativity for propaganda. But artists… like Dostoevsky said: artists create beauty and it is beauty that saves the world. Maybe you heard the music during George Floyd’s memorial service in Minneapolis? Perhaps you’ve see some of the protestors dancing together as the crowd sings Brother Bill Wither’s anthem: Lean On Me? Sometimes in our lives, we all have pain, we all have sorrow, but if we are wise we know that there’s always tomorrow. Lean on me, when you’re not strong and I’ll be your friend, I’ll help you carry on, for it won’t be long before I’m gonna need somebody to lean on. Brueggemann writes:
Our artists engage in futuring fantasy. They do not ask if the vision can be implemented, for questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The imagination must come before the implementation. Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing. The same royal consciousness that makes it possible to implement anything and everything is the one that shrinks imagination because imagination is a danger. That is why every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing future alternatives to the single one Pharaoh or the King wants to urge as the only thinkable one.
When we least expect it, beyond our control and despair, artists start to share songs and poems, dances and dramas, movies and paintings and sculptures that fill empty hearts broken open by grief. Their imaginations, like John Lennon sang, nourish our own impoverished souls with possibilities. Their sacred ability to give shape and form to the promise of redemption rather than predictions of the status quo are unique. And this, too, is how we become Holy Trinity people: by trusting our artists. By listening to them from our hearts. And by making it safe for the artists to keep going when the tyrants want to lock them down. Jesus told his friends: I want you now to go out into the whole world and fill it with images of hope – share the poetry of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit – God’s grace in everything – and bathe my people’s broken hearts in peace. Ok, I’ve paraphrased the Great Commission of Matthew, but I believe that artists do a better job of bathing people’s hearts in God’s sacred possibilities than most of our preachers. We’re too afraid, still not done with our own grieving, still thinking about implementation rather than imagination and our hearts haven’t yet been fully broken open for trusting a Holy Trinity life. So, the One who IS holy has anointed artists to help us. There’s a whole crop of NEW artists being commissioned by God to do this work during the pandemic and the uprising – and I can’t wait for them to baptize us in their creativity.
In the meantime, I find myself going back to mine the beauty of older artists who have brought me the balm in Gilead in previous seasons of my grief. One who continues to speak to my heart with passion and clarity is Mary Chapin-Carpenter – especially her introspective songs – although I LOVE her, “Shut Up and Kiss Me!” My favorite song – one I sang at my mother’s funeral - is “Jubilee.” It is a message I need to hear these days – and often – and maybe you do, too. So, I am going to share it with you as both a prayer of lament and hope trusting that it will evoke your encounter with taste of Holy Trinity living…
I can tell by the way you're walking that you don't want company
I'll let you alone and I'll let you walk on and in your own good time you'll be
Back where the sun can find you under the wise wishing tree
And with all of them made we'll lie under the shade and call it a jubilee
And I can tell by the way you're talking that the past isn't letting you go
But there's only so long you can take it all on and then the wrong's gotta be on its own
And when you're ready to leave it behind you you'll look back, and all that you'll see
Is the wreckage and rust that you left in the dust on your way to the jubilee
And I can tell by the way you're listening that you're still expecting to hear
Your name being called like a summons to all
Who have failed to account for their doubts and their fears
They can't add up to much without you so if it were just up to me
I'd take hold of your hand, saying come hear the band pay your song at the jubilee
And I can tell by the way you're searching for something you can't even name
That you haven't been able to come to the table: simply glad that you came
And when you feel like this try to imagine that we're all like frail boats on the sea
Just scanning the night for that great guiding light announcing the jubilee
And I can tell by the way you're standing with your eyes filling with tears
That it's habit alone keeps you turning for home even though your home is right here
Where the people who love you are gathered under the wise wishing tree
May we all be considered then straight on delivered down to the jubilee
'Cause the people who love you are waiting and they'll wait just as long as need be
When we look back and say those were halcyon days we're talking 'bout jubilee
And then, at a time of God’s choosing not ours, when everyone feels as if despair is eternal, hope is introduced through a culture’s artists through what has been called the prophetic imagination. It is not something politicians understand – nor is it the purview of bureaucrats or ideologues how God brings hope to a grieving people through its artists – but it is time-tested and true. Bureaucrats defund the arts in our schools and politicians manipulate creativity for propaganda. But artists… like Dostoevsky said: artists create beauty and it is beauty that saves the world. Maybe you heard the music during George Floyd’s memorial service in Minneapolis? Perhaps you’ve see some of the protestors dancing together as the crowd sings Brother Bill Wither’s anthem: Lean On Me? Sometimes in our lives, we all have pain, we all have sorrow, but if we are wise we know that there’s always tomorrow. Lean on me, when you’re not strong and I’ll be your friend, I’ll help you carry on, for it won’t be long before I’m gonna need somebody to lean on. Brueggemann writes:
Our artists engage in futuring fantasy. They do not ask if the vision can be implemented, for questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The imagination must come before the implementation. Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing. The same royal consciousness that makes it possible to implement anything and everything is the one that shrinks imagination because imagination is a danger. That is why every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing future alternatives to the single one Pharaoh or the King wants to urge as the only thinkable one.
When we least expect it, beyond our control and despair, artists start to share songs and poems, dances and dramas, movies and paintings and sculptures that fill empty hearts broken open by grief. Their imaginations, like John Lennon sang, nourish our own impoverished souls with possibilities. Their sacred ability to give shape and form to the promise of redemption rather than predictions of the status quo are unique. And this, too, is how we become Holy Trinity people: by trusting our artists. By listening to them from our hearts. And by making it safe for the artists to keep going when the tyrants want to lock them down. Jesus told his friends: I want you now to go out into the whole world and fill it with images of hope – share the poetry of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit – God’s grace in everything – and bathe my people’s broken hearts in peace. Ok, I’ve paraphrased the Great Commission of Matthew, but I believe that artists do a better job of bathing people’s hearts in God’s sacred possibilities than most of our preachers. We’re too afraid, still not done with our own grieving, still thinking about implementation rather than imagination and our hearts haven’t yet been fully broken open for trusting a Holy Trinity life. So, the One who IS holy has anointed artists to help us. There’s a whole crop of NEW artists being commissioned by God to do this work during the pandemic and the uprising – and I can’t wait for them to baptize us in their creativity.
In the meantime, I find myself going back to mine the beauty of older artists who have brought me the balm in Gilead in previous seasons of my grief. One who continues to speak to my heart with passion and clarity is Mary Chapin-Carpenter – especially her introspective songs – although I LOVE her, “Shut Up and Kiss Me!” My favorite song – one I sang at my mother’s funeral - is “Jubilee.” It is a message I need to hear these days – and often – and maybe you do, too. So, I am going to share it with you as both a prayer of lament and hope trusting that it will evoke your encounter with taste of Holy Trinity living…
I can tell by the way you're walking that you don't want company
I'll let you alone and I'll let you walk on and in your own good time you'll be
Back where the sun can find you under the wise wishing tree
And with all of them made we'll lie under the shade and call it a jubilee
And I can tell by the way you're talking that the past isn't letting you go
But there's only so long you can take it all on and then the wrong's gotta be on its own
And when you're ready to leave it behind you you'll look back, and all that you'll see
Is the wreckage and rust that you left in the dust on your way to the jubilee
And I can tell by the way you're listening that you're still expecting to hear
Your name being called like a summons to all
Who have failed to account for their doubts and their fears
They can't add up to much without you so if it were just up to me
I'd take hold of your hand, saying come hear the band pay your song at the jubilee
And I can tell by the way you're searching for something you can't even name
That you haven't been able to come to the table: simply glad that you came
And when you feel like this try to imagine that we're all like frail boats on the sea
Just scanning the night for that great guiding light announcing the jubilee
And I can tell by the way you're standing with your eyes filling with tears
That it's habit alone keeps you turning for home even though your home is right here
Where the people who love you are gathered under the wise wishing tree
May we all be considered then straight on delivered down to the jubilee
'Cause the people who love you are waiting and they'll wait just as long as need be
When we look back and say those were halcyon days we're talking 'bout jubilee
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