Trinity Sunday, 1996

A metaphor for the Divinity

Today is that most formidable of days to try to say something sensible about the Trinity Sunday. Just so everybody can share the misery of this effort, I'd like to propose a little thought experiment. Just close your eyes for a few seconds and think about the word "God" and see what happens... I do this fairly regularly and I suspect I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times that anything like a kind of Trinitarian imagery emerges. That's where the problem lies... How do we get hold of something that is only supposed to be a metaphor for the Divinity anyway? But it's clearly not utterly meaningless...

You know the early councils worked this out into the Greek categories of person, and nature, etc., etc.--I don't know how eloquent those are for us.... So there is something for us from classical theology that is retrievable and useful when we think about the Trinity and God as trinominal... What in brief is being said is that the ultimate reality, the reality that founds all other realities, is communitarian. It is not some kind of monolithic, solitary reality that exists in splendid isolation, but rather it is somehow, in ways that are simply unspeakable and probably unimaginable, sharing. So this is where classical theology, and this is the theology I got in the seminary, actually is somehow rehabilitatable... What the Greek theologians especially used to say is that the persons of the Trinity exist only because they are related to each other; there would not be a Father if there were not a Son, and logically this makes pretty good sense. It is just dry-as-toast logic talk: you can't have fraternity without friendship, you can't have the two without mutuality...

Okay, you can logically nail that down but I still don't know what good it does, except that I think it is possible to move it forward to the point where it is kind of adumbrated in that prayer at the beginning of Mass: "God will reveal ourselves and the depths of our being..." This seems to me to be absolutely true. I cannot be a person, I cannot be a self, outside of relationships... Of all extraordinary things, a Jewish theologian, Martin Buber, probably made more of this than anybody else in this century..., but he himself depended on Feuerbach and, to some extent, Hegel. In that great book of his that probably nobody reads anymore called Iron Knot, he says stuff like this: "there cannot be an 'I' if there is not a 'thou'," and it's absolutely great. I mean, psychologically we know that's true. If kids are not, just as soon as they're born, picked up, held, and talked to, not just nourished or kept warm, if they're not addressed, then nobody shows up. We have the example of several children to prove this absolutely. It is precisely in having a partner that I become real, and apart from that I'm never real... "Without a 'thou,' there is no 'I'." And we're not just talking about, well, "I need a paycheck, or I need somebody to boss..." We're talking about the most fundamental reality of myself whereby I come into being... And it seems to me that's what the prayer is getting at with all this business of the Trinity itself as subsistent relationships... You cannot have anything outside of relationships.

The problem for us, I think, beside that being a very counter-cultural kind of notion, or a notion that is so easily trivialized that everybody stands around in a kind of accidental fashion supplying particular needs at particular points, is that it may be very hard to believe. And also, because of the cyclic dynamics of us becoming 'I's, we think that the pattern shifts from one of absolute interdependence to absolute independence--but it doesn't. It's rather, simply, that the pattern of connections changes, but the connections are always there. If you don't believe it, think about all those times that you've become angry and you've simply wanted everybody else to go away, you've backed yourself into some great black study... in which the very sound of your own voice resonates into some kind of infinite, hollow emptiness..., and imagine staying there...

Ted Kazinsky of the New York Times wrote this enormous biography of this guy who was radically detached from everybody from the time he was a little kid. And so, because his 'I' blows up, he would talk about ecology and the dangers of technology, and then he goes and kills people... It is a very interesting figure, but I don't think he's just a nut-case. I think he realizes the great Western tradition of "the Mountain-Man," the "strong, silent type" who lives absolutely from his own resources... and then rots as a human being so that he is absolutely disconnected, and disconnectable...

I think the problem for us is to first of all sustain the belief, maybe first, second, and last of all too, that my reality is bestowed upon me, for better or worse, I'm invested with myself by my connections with others... period... not just because I need somebody to make clothes or shoes, or to cut my hair, or do my laundry, but simply that somebody constitutes me. And that's the great drama of life. So this is why I think it is possible to draw the Feast of the Trinity out of the midst of sheer obscurity into something that is at least modestly apprehensible. If we are made in the image of God, as Genesis says, then it is absolutely not good for us to be alone, and it is impossible for us to be alone.

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