“Why do we have to hear all this stuff about the Trinity?”

This question burst forth from a gentleman in the third row as I was giving a marvelous and subtle explanation of that topic.

  “Why can’t we just go to church and be good to each other?”

Would he allow me to explain, I asked.

The Triune God is not some kind of brainy speculation by scholars. It is the way we experience God in this world. To do what you said, “go to church and be good to each other,” is the Trinity in action!

Would you allow me to explain?

First, long ago, human beings learned that there is only one God, and that he “found delight in the human race.” Think of the many, many stories in the First Testament about God’s pursuit of us, his laboring to make a loving and holy covenant with us: “I will be your God and you will be my people.” Like a marriage agreement.

Well, as in a marriage arrangement, God became by turns angry, hurt, delighted, spurned, glorified, ignored, praised and rejected. Yet God kept coming back and back to renew the covenant. God's love remained steadfast, even if ours sometimes does not.

Then we found out that God’s nature had always consisted of another component!

His very nature had always been to relate to others, to “pour himself forth,” as the First Reading puts it, and to receive back. The “Second Person” had been at one with the “First Person” for all eternity.

So, this Second Person was made flesh, called by us the Word. We saw him. Jesus laughed and cried and preached and turned over tables and cured people, and was loyal to his friends even unto the end. “He said, “everything the Father has is mine” (Gospel). That’s how we knew he was The Word and the Word was God. Somehow, two persons in one God.

Then came a third revelation about the Trinity. Jesus hints about it in the Gospel: “I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now.” In other words, our small souls would burst with the greatness of God—unless God gentled himself down and would begin to actually dwell within us, guiding our understanding.

So Jesus promised to pour out the Holy Spirit into us. He tells us that the Spirit is God. “Everything that the Father has is mine; for this reason I told you that he [God the Spirit] will take from what is mine and declare it to you.”

Do you get the logic? Everything the Father has belongs to the Word. Everything that Jesus the Word has belongs to the Spirit. The Spirit is the third part of God, so to speak, and it bestows us and the whole earth back upon the Father, thus closing the circle.

What aliveness, what movement there is in God: speaking, reaching out, flowing forth, receiving back. God is liquid motion, a dynamism in which everything is changing always, yet always remaining the same because it is love. We are invited into that circle of love. Even in today’s difficult world.

And that is why we hear “all this stuff about the trinity”!