Sunday Reflection with Canon Robin Gibbons - 4 June 2023

Angels at Ramle Trinity - Rublev

The Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity

The Long Search

I am quite happy not to know everything about God, nor to have the most knowledgeably theology about the Triune One who we celebrate this Trinity Sunday. We need mysteries and conundrums to pull us onwards into life's fullness. I'm reminded of my own journey of delightful exploration getting to know and perhaps understand a bit more the mystery of my parents and grandparents as well as other relatives and dearly loved friends long gone. There is something unique about the capacity of the human person to reflect, and having reflected to shape or change an opinion. It is certainly very much that image Paul gives us of reasoning as a child which changes when we grow, my relationship with those people in my life isn't static, the years have not kept the memories of parent, friend, grandparent fixed in some kind of mental and emotional aspic, but quite delightfully have grown, and yes engaged in searching for them in order to understand them more. I hope this is the same for you because it seems to me this also fits in with our faith in the Triune God in this form; the unknown but ever-present creator or Abba who is outside of us beyond experience as we know it, through the Risen Lord and His continued gift to us of presence, knowledge and love through the Spirit who is ever with us. We talk often about searching for God, and this to me is what this feast represents, the long search.

The Names of God

In simple terms the `Trinity' is a reality of love, the manner or ways in which our relationship with the impossible truth and mystery of a God, who is outside of all creation, the truly 'beyond one', whose love is nevertheless discerned and found in the human situation of a life incarnate in Christ, who living amongst us for a period of human time shows us how we too connect with God, yet as the Risen One is also close to us always in the glory shared and brought to us by the unseen yet energetic Spirit present in all places and times. We do not know the true name of the One God except perhaps in that self expression of 'I Am' or as in our first reading today in the Exodus account of the Lord telling us: "So the LORD passed before him and proclaimed: The LORD, the LORD, a God gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in love and fidelity" (Ex 34: 6) Despite much of our corrective desires to change language, the use of Lord is important, here it is very much a direct statement of identity, 'I am the Lord', so don't discard that word because it is one of so many we can use to call on the Holy One. Others here before us in our first reading are clear, gracious, merciful, loving, faithful and slow to anger! Isn't it time we recovered the many ways in which the Scriptures address God, it might remove us from preoccupations with our own limited vocabulary, instead open us out to the majestic sounds of poetry and praise.

The Dance of the `Trinity'

But for Christians there is also that interconnectedness of the Triune One, who is not only hard to capture, but who can be glimpsed in Christ and in the divine energy of the Holy Spirit, movement is part of their gift, just as movement is part of our living anyone, we turn towards another, we offer and receive love, we become part of their lives. There is a term used by the teachers of the faith in our Christian past, perichoresis, meaning a cyclical movement, reciprocity, and interpenetration. It is also a term used for a typical Greek wedding dance, where we discover there are not two dancers, but at least three. The theologians in the early Church, observing the dance, and knowing the sense of the verb gave us the term perichoresis to describe the reality of the Holy Trinity.

It was John of Damascus, who explored the doctrine of perichoresis and described it as a "cleaving together". He said: 'The three Persons of the Trinity 'are made one not to commingle, but to cleave to each other, and they have their being in each other without any coalescence or commingling.' What does that mean, well very simply that the Trinity is about harmony of relationship in which by mutual giving and receiving love is transferred, given and grows into ONE love refracted in these three, but it is ever active, ever moving onwards towards our perfection. Perichoresis is the dance of love. But does all this help us to understand the Trinity? Maybe! But the way for us to go is not that of theological discourse (unless you happen to be a theologian) rather a call to step into the dance of mystery with the Trinity, praise, thanksgiving, intercession, these elements of prayer are the key to open up the gift, if you want to know why, listen to Jesus, remember that he says to 'ask in my name', there is the clue, pray in the wonderful way we hold so dear, begin your prayer, liturgy, grace before meals, with the sign of the cross in the name of the Trinity, and use this blessing/greeting often : 'The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the holy Spirit be with all of you"(2Cor 13:13) maybe I shall leave you with some of the ways John of Damascus describes God:

'Uncreated, without beginning, immortal, infinite, eternal, immaterial, good, creative, just, enlightening, immutable, passionless, uncircumscribed, immeasurable, unlimited, undefined, unseen, unthinkable, wanting in nothing, being His own rule and authority, all-ruling, life-giving, omnipotent, of infinite power, containing and maintaining the universe and making provision for all" (OF 1.14). may you each discover the richness of our God ever present and ever loving , Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Lectio

Let the world be silent Let not the stars shine their lights
Calm the winds, silence the rivers
Let all praise the Father, the Son and the Holy spirit
Let all sing together Amen, Amen.
Let kings bow, and God receive the glory!
The sole giver of good things, Amen Amen.

Gregory of Nazianzen

No sooner do I conceive of the one than I am illumined by the splendour of the three;
no sooner do I distinguish them than I am carried back to the one.

When I think of anyone of the three I think of him as the whole, and my eyes are filled, and the greater part of what I am thinking escapes me.
I cannot grasp the greatness of that one so as to attribute a greater greatness to the rest.

When I contemplate the three together, I see but one torch, and cannot divide or measure out the undivided light.

Gregory Nazianzen, Orations 40.41.

Votive antiphon for the Trinity by Hildegard of Bingen

Praise to the Trinity-the sound and life
and creativity of all within their life,
the praise of the angelic host
and wondrous, brilliant splendour hid,
unknown to human minds, it is,
and life within all things.

Translation by Nathaniel M Campbell.

From A Litany by John Donne

The Trinity

O blessed glorious Trinity,
Bones to philosophy, but milk to faith,
Which, as wise serpents, diversely
Most slipperiness, yet most entanglings hath,
As you distinguish'd, undistinct,
By power, love, knowledge be,
Give me a such self different instinct,
Of these let all me elemented be,
Of power, to love, to know you unnumbered three.