Friends, welcome to The Book of Common Words, where we explore the Christian spirituality of being human through podcast, poetry, and prose about my life, art, and the Christian faith. I’m your writer, Aaron. This publication is 100% reader supported. Thanks for joining me in this exploration.
As Christians, we believe in a mystery.
The Eastern Orthodox Bishop and Theologian Kallistos Ware put it this way in his book “The Orthodox Way.”
“We see that it is not the task of Christianity to provide easy answers to every question, but to make us progressively aware of a mystery. God is not so much the object of our knowledge as the cause of our wonder.”
Central to this mystery, at the core of this wonder, is the Trinitarian nature of God. Out of every Christian doctrine, The Trinity is perhaps the biggest source of mystery. To be sure, there have been articulations about the Trinity as long as there have been Christian theologians. The Athanasian Creed puts it (in part) like this: “That we worship one God in trinity and the trinity in unity, neither blending their persons nor dividing their essence.” But even such heady statements about the Trinity leave us in mystery.
Mystery is the precursor to faith. Without mystery, there can be no faith, no trusting belief. Without mystery, God could be reduced and catalogued, becoming nothing more than another dogmatic volume on the shelf of theology.
But we don’t worship a dry, small, catalog-able God. The God we worship has become known to us as a mystery, as a wonder, as something—indeed someone—that is beyond our scope of reason and imagination. We worship one God in three persons, the blessed Trinity.
We relate to the three persons of the trinity in different ways: God the Father we view as our creator, our sustainer. God the Son (Jesus) is our savior and exemplar, the one who we follow. God the Holy Spirit transforms and empowers us to live as Jesus’ body here and now. These distinctions help us grasp the persons of the trinity, but we cannot forget that they are one being, not tied together in mission or just different rolls God takes. That they are one being means God’s essence, who and what God is, is unified together, even as God remains three distinct persons.
It’s a mind bender that we can’t understand, let alone speak of completely.
Yet, even with this ineffable mystery, we can’t simply write the Trinity off as something we can never know, so let’s not think about it. It’s important to spend time with this mystery, ponder on it, reflect on its fascists, and let it sink into our hearts.
Why though?
Why is the Trinity so important? We dedicate a Sunday in our liturgical year to this doctrine—the only doctrine that has its own celebratory Sunday! We confess the Trinity every week as we recite the Nicene Creed. We baptize in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, just as Jesus commanded us to. Why do we do all this for a mystery we can’t fully understand?
Let me suggest one core reason to hold the trinity close to our everyday lives: the trinity reveals that God, at God’s heart, is relational.
The being of God is a relationship between the three distinct persons of the Trinity. To put it another way, the relationship between God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit is what makes up the very essence of God.
God is a god of relationship. Indeed, relationship is at the heart of the essence of God. And this is why it is so important for us to dwell on and regularly confess our belief in the Trinity: believing God to be in relationship with Godself leads us to believe that God is in relationship with us, and indeed all the fabric of reality.
Jesus is God incarnate, God in flesh, and Jesus came to be in relationship. He had a family. He gathered twelve specific disciples that he later called his friends. He had other friends as well, friends like Lazarus and Mary Magdalene. Jesus ate and drank and conversed with other humans. He cared about relationships.
Jesus is not an abnormality in the nature of God. As the second person of the Trinity, Jesus fully demonstrates and embodies the full nature of the Trinitarian God. This tells us that God wants to be in a relationship with us. We can look back on the history of Israel and see this. God revealed Godself more and more to Israel so that they could know who God is, and learn to worship in spirit and in truth. God intervened in their battles, often doing the fighting for Israel. God sent prophets when Israel went astray so that they would return to him. God spoke about Israel as a lover, as a wife.
This is the same God, the same God revealed in Jesus, that we worship today. A God of relationship.
And God wants to be in a relationship with us. Jesus is present in a real way when we come to the Eucharistic table. We believe the Spirit to be present in our worship, carrying our prayers and our praise heavenward to the throne of God. We invoke God in our collects, praying our prayers in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
All of this tells us that God wants to be involved with us, God’s church, God’s people.
There’s another level of this desire for relationships, though. God not only desires to be in relationship with us the church, God wants to be relationship with you, with me. God wants personal relationships. Through tools like spiritual disciplines, the daily office, music, even nature, God is speaking and inviting us into a deeper more intimate relationship. God has given us the Bible that we might come to see God’s fullness, and that we might reflect on what that means for us, for our lives, for our relationships.
The Trinitarian God is a relational God, and that should make us who are trying to reflect the image of God into relational people.
Being human means we have relationships. Family, friends, acquaintances, even our brief interactions with a grocery store clerk are all relationships that make up the fabric of our days, of our lives. But reflecting the relational God means more than just having relationships. Following in the footsteps of the Trinity means we have intentional relationships, relationships that go beyond formality into compassion and care.
This is why the Trinity matters. If God is more than a static truth we must learn to believe, if God is a relationship within Godself, then the world around us, the world God fills and sustains, is a dynamic place, full of relationships. Interpersonal relationships. Relationships between humans and nature. Relationships between citizens and governments. Everywhere we look, relationships are the building block, the foundation, and the construction of our lives, our laws, and our leisure.
So, what kind of relationships are you going to have?
The Trinitarian God wants good relationships with us, so he reconciled all things to Godself in Jesus. Through the second person of the Trinity, God has made all things right with God. While we don’t see it fully now, we can be a part of making the mystery of reconciliation known. As people who worship, follow, and try to emulate the Trinitarian God, the relationships we have both reflect our relationship with God and invite people into their own relationship with God. When we have a relationship with a relational God, a God who forgives, who draws near, who loves us, we should have relationships that reflect those same values and actions. Having relationships that are full of love invite people to ask us why we choose to live this way, especially in the face of the anger, hatred, exclusion, and selfish toxicity that seems to dominate the public sphere these days. Then we get to tell people about this God, this Trinity, who loves us deeply.
So, the mystery of the Trinity is more than simply a dry doctrine we scratch our heads at. It is the revelation of who God is, what kind of god God is, and the desire God has for relationships with each and every one of us. This is good news.
So, I invite you to reflect often on this relationship between God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. I urge you to let the mystery lead you to doxology and wonder at the truth that, even as we can’t understand it, we are invited into the truth of God’s relationship with Godself. Let these reflections, these thoughts, these questions invite us deeper into the love that makes up the relationship of the Trinity so that we can take that love, given to us, and give it to the world, the people, the relationships around us.
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