A brief thought for the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, June 15, 2025
Proverbs 8:22-31, Romans 5:1-5, John 16:12-15
Our belief that the almighty, omniscient, omnipresent deity we call “God” is one Supreme Being in three distinct Persons usually makes our brains hurt.
Makes them explode.
Makes us do that thing when we flip the sides of our index fingers against our lips to make that wubba-bubba sound to indicate we’ve gone crackers.
Makes many of us try to come up with some way to equate the Trinity in Unity with some human construct.
Some folks equate our Triune God to a corporation; others, to a team.
My theory was always role-based or task-based. The Father did this, the Son did that, the Holy Spirit did yet another thing.
Sounds good, right?
Wrong.
Yeah, I used to dabble in that heresy when it came to the Most Holy Trinity. I try very, very hard not to think like that anymore, at least, not in the last 60 years or so.
But it can be a challenge not to try to pin down exactly who God is, as relates to Three in One. Especially when clover — shamrocks — are growing in the lawn.
Here are a couple of points I learned from much saner and much calmer instructors.
Our God is a perfect relationship, based on the pure love of the Three Persons. God is all things to everyone and is the perfect example of how relationships are supposed to work.
Because God is not driven by what we perceive as space and time, the Three Persons can be sequential yet not. The Father begat the Son, and from their love for everyone and everything in this and all universes, the Spirit proceeds. But Son and Spirit are just as eternal — forward and backward — as the Father. So God’s rules about time apply in this matter, not Einstein’s or Newton’s.
Yet God did subject his/herself to Earthly rules when Jesus walked the dusty roads of the Holy Land 2,000 years ago. God — embodying the absolute best of femininity and masculinity alike — became fully human while remaining divine.
Because almighty. Because loving beyond all human comprehension while pouring out that love with blood at Golgotha.
Our God is one God in Three Persons, with the second Person — whom we know as Jesus of Nazareth, itinerant rabbi, Good Shepherd, Prince of Peace — giving us a vision of the living God. Giving us the confidence to call God our Father, to call God our friend, to call God’s name when we’re in trouble.
And God always answers, with an answer that’s always in our best interests.
And so:
Let’s leave the brain-busting to folks who don’t sneeze when they open old dusty books to try to slice-and-dice the Trinity in Unity.
Let’s focus on this: God is love, God loves, and we are children of God, called to love and be love like our Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier.
(Easier to understand than to do. We humans are imperfect beings, after all.)
P.S. Yes, I’m on the road again.
