LITURGY
AND LIFE
By
Marie-Louise Ternier-Gommers
Divine
math is infinitely better than human math
Trinity Sunday
May 30, 2010
Proverbs 8:22-31
Psalm 8
Romans 5:1-5
John 16:12-15
My husband, who makes his
living in the garden now, has a BA in mathematics, and our daughter
clearly inherited her father’s gift for math. Both of them take
great delight in seeing my blank looks as they try to explain the X’s
and Y’s and parentheses. For them it all makes perfect sense and
for me, well, it just doesn’t add up.
Given this lack of mathematical
prowess, I may not be the best one to write a column on the Trinity.
But since God’s logic is not ours anyway, that might actually
play in my favour.
Before we get to the divine
math question, a word about mystery. Do you remember the catechism question
about what a mystery is? Answer: something you cannot explain. A better
definition of mystery might be something you can only understand by
living it. For example, it’s hard to understand what losing a
loved one is like when you’ve never experienced it. But once someone
you deeply love dies, you learn something about love and grief and loss
that no one could have explained to you. That’s how Trinity is
a mystery: it takes time and heart-experience to “live into”
an understanding of it.
The Trinity is a bit like
the roundness of the earth. Do we accept that the earth is round? Most
of us will say yes. Yet in our everyday walking about we don’t
experience the earth as round. The road we walk on, drive on, bike on,
is flat. To really experience the earth as round, we need a globe or
a photo taken in outer space. It’s hard to comprehend the earth
as round as long as we’re an integral part of it. And the earth
is so large, and we’re so small, that we cannot see the complete
picture.
It’s the same with
the Trinity: Father, Son, Holy Spirit. It’s hard to comprehend
because we are part of it and cannot see the complete picture. Yet Scripture
helps us experience and thus understand the mystery that, and here comes
the divine math formula: ONE + ONE + ONE = ONE
It is no accident that the
church chose today’s first reading from Proverbs, a text in which
Wisdom speaks. Wisdom is the divine feminine principle, and exists before
anything else. Wisdom/Spirit is with Logos, the Word, which we traditionally
attribute to the divine masculine principle. But, as Scott Hahn points
out in his book on the Trinity, First Comes Love, the Holy Spirit/Wisdom
has a “motherly role as comforter and consoler. What a mother
does in the natural order, the Holy Spirit accomplishes in the supernatural
order. What earthly mothers do finitely and inchoately, the Spirit accomplishes
infinitely and perfectly” (p. 130).
Being a responsible scholar,
Hahn, searching the Scriptures’ own definition on the Holy Spirit,
concludes: “As our mothers gave us birth, so the Spirit gives
us rebirth. As a mother feeds her children, so the Spirit feeds the
children of God with spiritual milk. As a mother groans in labour, so
the Spirit groans to give us life” (p. 131).
Wisdom and Logos together
reside with God before creation. Together they are God who is Love,
a God who delights — in creation, in the world, in the human race.
God who is Love, the first person of the Trinity.
And if God is love, then
God cannot be single. If God is love, then God has to be interpersonal,
because Love is not love unless it has somewhere to direct that love.
Remember, God said in Genesis: “Let us make humankind in our image,
according to our likeness.” Male and female human beings together
mirror the communion of divine love. Love needs another to love.
And so Paul tells us in today’s
reading: we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through
whom we have obtained access to the grace in which we stand. In Jesus
the Logos/Wisdom of God became human so as to reveal the essence and
fullness of love in action — love given and love received, regardless
of the suffering life brings.
This is why Paul reminds
us that suffering with love — and Jesus showed this quite vividly
— has the power to produce endurance, and endurance produces character,
and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us. The stronger
our hope, the greater the love of God poured out into our hearts. Jesus
gave God’s Love a human face, a human heart. God now had someone
to love and through whom to love us. Jesus is infinite love in finite
form. As the Son, Jesus is the second person of the Trinity.
And Jesus knows well that
our little minds and hearts cannot comprehend things as big as God,
just as we cannot see the roundness of the earth we walk on, or comprehend
the intricacies of a butterfly: “I still have many things to say
to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes,
he will guide you into all the truth.” So Jesus promises the Holy
Spirit — that “mysterious” feminine breath and energy,
residing in God before creation — who brought courage to the disciples
at Pentecost, and who brings confidence and clarity to us.
The Spirit is like a faint
beacon of hope that, like a concerned mother, sheds light on our path
when we grope in the darkness of bad choices or bad luck. That Spirit
of God that reassures in times of confusion and uncertainty. That holy
and nurturing Light of Love warms our hearts in the cold of pain and
suffering. The Holy Spirit, third person of the Trinity.
Trinity is the name for the
divine dance of love which never ends and which manifests itself in
our own lives. Or, as Scott Hahn, says: Trinity is the dynamic family
love in God, from which the human family draws the love we find between
father, mother and child. It is dynamic, moving from one to another
and back, loving and creating, healing and forgiving, guiding and inspiring,
and back to loving. It is perfect communion, with perfect giving and
receiving. And the yearning for this perfect giving and receiving is
coded right into our DNA . . . .
The Father/Mother calls us
to share in the divine capacity to bring forth life, to create, to nourish
and to sustain. The Son invites us to ongoing compassion, healing, sacrifice,
reconciliation in the world. Our commitment to make amends, to heal,
to forgive makes us heirs in the redemption and salvation of Jesus the
Son. The Holy Spirit fuels our imagination and inspiration, expresses
our need of guidance, increasing our hunger for wisdom and insight,
for our ability to grow in knowledge and understanding. It is thus that
we are made in God’s image, made for Love, made for living inside
the Trinity, even if we cannot see this all the time.
And so we find ourselves inside the divine round-dance of love — God is not static, but dynamic. God is not power, but love. Therefore, God needs to be community, communion. God is one, but not single. So — God is One + God is personal + God is Love = God is Three. ONE + ONE + ONE = ONE. I love divine math better than human math.
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