An Experience of Mystery

Everything God has revealed is for living, is for use. If we seriously want God, then we have to think out for ourselves what the various formulations of faith really mean to us.

- Ruth Burrows

It was a few years ago. I was sitting on a dock in Idaho, and it was not quite 5:00 am. I heard the lovely noises of the stirring earth: the lapping of the water against the weathered wood; the honking of geese, flying beyond my sight; and the playful chirps and tweets of various birds I could not identify. Just to my left, I heard the splash of a fish, rising to grab the small bugs that skittered across the water. Across the lake, I saw a mist shimmering and rising—like the patronus of some hidden wizard—and as I looked up, I saw wispy clouds, pinking with the still hidden dawn, as the shadow-lit water—ever changing and ever the same—cut a straight line across the bottom of the farther shore. I felt the cool of the morning and the slight wetness of the chair where I sat, yet also sensed the promise of a warm, lovely day. And as I sat, sight and sound and feeling all become one moment, a singular experience, a holy trinity of the living world: grace unfolding in creation, holding me, mothering me, speaking to me, in whispers and embraces and images, the message of resurrection, "Come forth! Come forth!"

This week, we celebrate one of the great and abiding mysteries of our faith: the Solemnity of the Holy Trinity. When we speak of it in the language of doctrine, we note that one God—Transcendent, Unchanging, Ineffable—is, at the same time, three Persons—distinct, unique, irreducible one to the other. We affirm that the oneness of this God and the threeness of the persons are both true simultaneously, without canceling one another out—an article of faith that is more than our minds can conceive or our imagination picture. Thus, we speak of the Trinity as mystery. Yet, in naming this article of our faith as "mystery," we may allow ourselves simply to ignore it, to set it aside with other things we don't really understand like quantum mechanics or the language of teenagers. Though we speak about the Trinity, starting or ending our prayers "in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit," our lives can seem unintruded upon by an encounter with the Trinity, by the transcendent reality that structures not just the universe but the very God from whom the universe flows. More's the pity.

This negative sense of mystery—as that which we cannot conceive intellectually—gives too much importance, I believe, to the power of intellect in the life of the human being. Certainly, thinking is important, and the ability to grasp a concept is one of the great powers of the human soul. But it is not the only power we have, and perhaps not even the greatest one—we are more than minds in bodies. Each day we live amid mystery which is not just confusion, but which is as vast and complex as the God in whose image and likeness we have been made. 

There are things that by their very nature are incapable of completion in thought—beauty, hope, truth, faith, love. We have the ability to experience all these, not because we can tie them up in a clear conceptual package, but because, as human beings we, too, are mysterious—always outstripping in our life the reductive power of conception. The Danish theologian, Søren Kierkegaärd, put it this way: "We are everything we have ever done, plus freedom." And that little plus, puts our lives beyond the power of a merely intellectual construct, into the place of mystery; the very place where we touch the single, triune God.

Thus, when we profess that the Trinity is a mystery, we are not, in that, declaring it to be irrelevant; rather, we are declaring that God's deepest identity is like our own—or, rather, our own identity echoes, as image and likeness, the very being of God. Like us, God is a being of multiplicity and unity—where the beloved is bonded with the one who loves, in an inexplicable (but, nevertheless, true) experience of loving. From all eternity, we imagine the Father loving the Son and the Son returning that love, a movement of mutual gifts which is, itself, the Holy Spirit.

We know this experience—as parents and children, as spouses and lovers, as those who hold onto a beloved one as they die, and as those who feel an unbreakable bond with a child who has just arrived. Or if we do not know it in any of these moments, we know it in our longing for connection, in the very ache which rises through us sometimes. And while we cannot explain adequately this love, this spirit of connection—nor even think it clearly—we know that it is something true to our humanity. We may only express it with metaphors and images, but we know that this mystery is the purpose and goal of our life. It is our union with God, and with each other.

The Trinity, thus, is not an obscure theological concept. Rather, the Trinity permeates our life and our being, blessing us beyond what our mind can fashion. It is experienced in the the union of sight and sound and feeling when we are in nature, or in the communion of lover and beloved. The Trinity is the living and passionate God, who makes room for us within the heart of Divine Nature, and who invites us to be and to become what God is—a communion of mystery and grace. Far from obscure, this is a mystery that you already know, that you experience as wondrous and yet common, that you sense is both part of you and makes you part of so much more. A mystery that matters . . . when you don't think about it too hard.

 

Photo: Sunrise, Henrys Fork of the Snake River, Island Park, Idaho. Flickr / Ken Lund (cc)