When I was little, the Trinity was explained to me using an egg. I remember a whiteboard and a bold black marker and a diagram: shell, yolk, white. Father, Son, Holy Ghost. Today I cross myself as I speak those names, my thumb, index, and middle fingers pressed together—three in one—while my ring finger and pinky touch the palm of my hand—the god-man Christ, descending to earth.
Mind-boggling stuff. And though none of our many metaphors or sacraments will ever really capture what we’re talking about when we talk about any of this, I think the egg imagery does an especially terrible job. You may as well say the Trinity is a cheeseburger. Bun, patty, cheese. Ah, okay—now I understand what “triune” means.
No shame intended for my former Sunday school teachers. How else were they meant to explain it? As if I could do any better? But no one ever told me why the essential doctrinal teaching of the Trinity even mattered. As fun as it was to have a little mental wrestle with the idea, I think I walked away from that whole lesson with a vague takeaway of, “Huh. Well, we’re a bunch of weirdos for believing that.”
And now, a child to the faith once again after a long winding rabbit-trail away from that weirdness and then most of the way back, I wonder: what difference does the Trinity actually make in my life, or in yours?
Love Before the Beginning
Let’s put aside our flawed attempts to conceptualize the Trinity—accepting that we never really can, and that’s fine and dandy and par for the course—in order to think through why it matters.
In Wishful Thinking, Frederick Buechner describes the three persons of the Trinity as the mystery beyond us (Father), the mystery among us (Son), and the mystery within us (Spirit)—a threefold and singular mystery, a mystery that tells us something about ourselves and how we experience God.
He continues:
“The Trinity [means that] God does not need the Creation in order to have something to love because within himself love happens. In other words, the love God is is love not as a noun but as a verb. This verb is reflexive as well as transitive.”
We don’t worship a solitary God but a God that is and always has been communion itself: three beings eternally turned toward one another. Protons, neutrons, electrons, all fizzling around at the speed of light, pulled together by the lifegiving force that is love.
Which means that love is not an extracurricular activity of the Christian life. It is participation in the life of God. The universe emerged from love—from abundance and innate togetherness. “We” quite literally came before “me.” While the modern imagination tends to assume the individual comes first and relationships are things we choose to add onto our lives later, the Trinity turns it all backwards and inside out and upside down.
God’s persons did not begin as isolated individuals who later decide to cooperate. Relationship is fundamental to who God is. And if humans are made in God’s image, then we are not fundamentally autonomous individuals either. We become ourselves through love, communion, responsibility, sacrifice, friendship, marriage, family, church, neighborhood.
Isn’t that a wild and wonderful thing?
As G.K. Chesterton puts it in Orthodoxy, “God Himself is a society… This triple enigma is as comforting as wine and open as an English fireside… this thing that bewilders the intellect utterly quiets the heart.”
Neighbor-Love and Other Wild, Tangible Mysteries
Reality itself is relational, and that fact quieted Chesterton’s heart. Good for him. It sometimes quiets mine too, but sometimes, also, it very much does not. Sometimes it is just incredibly, itchily, aggravatingly inconvenient.
Because believing in our three-in-one God changes the way we love people—or should love people—in an active, practical, daily sort of way. The Trinity tells us that if God is in constant, eternal communion, then communion itself is holy and necessary and, maybe, all that matters. That our striving for true communion with God must involve striving for true communion with our neighbors, his image-bearers. And that means that our faith can never be an escape from the world, but only ever a movement deeper into it. It is Mother Maria Skobtsova’s “mysticism of human communion,” which claims—as Christ did—that love of God must involve love of neighbor:
“Who, after that, can differentiate the worldly from the heavenly in the human soul, who can tell where the image of God ends and heaviness of human flesh begins! In communing with the world in the person of each individual human being, we know that we are communing with the image of God, and, contemplating that image, we touch the Archetype—we commune with God.” – Mother Maria, Essential Writings
Personally, I would much rather escape from the world than move deeper into it. Living alone is a whole lot simpler than living alongside and all enmeshed with others. Love is messy and painful and overwhelming. Love is hurt feelings and difficult conversation and washing someone else’s nasty crusty dishes and holding a child while she vomits and bending and compromising and not running away even when it’s hard, and it is often hard.
But it is also, I know in my bones, so, so good, and all that matters. And it is what makes us who we are—it is what lets us become love, as we were created to be. And the Trinity teaches us that. The Trinity teaches us the transcendent strangeness and nitty-gritty ordinariness of love.
Because the Trinity, and love itself, are somehow both things at once: mysterious, nebulous, unknowable, ungraspable. And real-as-dirt, tangible, doable, vital.
As Wendell Berry’s barber puts it in Jayber Crow:
“Of all that we feel and do, all the virtues and all the sins, love alone crowds us at last over the edge of the world. For love is always more than a little strange here. It is not explainable or even justifiable. It is itself the justifier. We do not make it. If it did not happen to us, we could not imagine it… It is in the world but is not altogether of it. It is of eternity. It takes us there when it most holds us here.”
Love, as revealed and modeled through the Trinity, is a mystery and a paradox: it both takes us there and holds us here. It, as my father once irritably told me during an argument about the paradoxical existence of free will and God’s sovereignty, “just is! Both things at the same time! You just have to accept it!” (I’m trying, Dad.)
This all makes it pretty difficult to keep our faith abstract. We humans and our love are made of clouds and made of mud, and so is the God we believe in: a man who got sweaty in the sun and ate bread when he was hungry, the Creator of the universe, the spirit of hope and wisdom descending to rest on us as a dove, as a tongue of flame, lighter than air. The God we believe in is all three of these things at once, and more, and is love itself, and we meet him most when we gather together right here and right now on this broken and beautiful earth, with our hangnails and mood swings and spinach between our teeth. This is where we meet him. Not by escaping our own troublesome humanness, or avoiding the many inconvenient humans around us… but by entering ever more fully, more lovingly, into communion and community with them.
