Trinity Sunday Reflection with Fr Robin Gibbons - May 22nd 2016
How do you communicate God to others? How do you find God yourself? Those are two questions I often ask myself. I've never found the Christian view of God as Trinity an impossible conundrum, maybe because I was helped to approach it by a wise old monk who used the expressions of prayer and worship to show me a theology of relationship and connection that we glimpse through a symbolic world.
How can I describe God as an eternal presence beyond and outside of my life yet recognize in Jesus the generosity of God living, pitching his tent with us as fully part of human existence and yet also be there invisible in all places and all times as our advocate and helper? I love that meditation on Wisdom that comes in the passage from Proverbs 8; there is something hauntingly beautiful in that strong image of God beyond all creation, always there, as Wisdom always present:
"the beginning of his ways,
the forerunner of his prodigies of long ago;
from of old I was poured forth,
at the first, before the earth."
There is something deep in the human heart that longs for God, seeks for the wisdom to understand who the Most High is, and yet as the poetic words of Proverbs hint, can only to be found in relationship, in the delight and playfulness of wonder at a love beyond all loving.
The short passage from Romans 5.1-5, puts it in a more structured way, through faith in the Lord Jesus we have access to and peace with God and we receive grace, that loving gift of merciful redemption, this is not an abstract event but an action of love that touches our hearts deeply. Even though we live in an imperfect and sinful world with its tremendous problems, we also have an abiding and indwelling hope, and we also have love, poured into our hearts by the abiding gift of the Spirit.
This is what our Triune God is, a community of love beyond measure in which Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier give and receive from each other, as the fathers put it they dance as One (perichoresis), a dance which we are called to share by opening ourselves to the Holy, reflecting in our prayer and worship, life and sacraments the image of God present in us.
Here's how C S Lewis in Mere Christianity puts it: " ...in Christianity God is not a static thing -- not even a person -- but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance."
And with God and us the dance goes on!
Fr Robin Gibbons is an Eastern Rite Chaplain for the Melkite Greek Catholics in Britain