The Holy Trinity
Brennan Manning was born in 1934 in New York City. When he graduated high school, Manning attended St. John’s University for two years before joining the US Marine Corps and fighting in the Korean War. He attended Saint Francis Catholic Seminary in Loretto, Pennsylvania, graduating in 1963 and was ordained as a Franciscan priest. He spent a portion of his life serving the poor as a member of the Little Brothers of Jesus of Charles de Foucauld in Spain and Switzerland. He then spent six months in solitary reflection in the remote desert of Spain. He left the Franciscan order in 1970 in order to get married. He focused his career on writing and public speaking. He died in 2013.
Recently, I ran across the following quote from Brennan Manning:
“The gospel is absurd, and the life of Jesus is meaningless unless we believe that He lived, died, and rose again with but one purpose in mind: to make brand-new creation. Not to make people with better morals but to create a community of prophets and professional lovers, men and women who would surrender to the mystery of the fire of the Spirit that burns within, who would live in ever greater fidelity to the omnipresent Word of God, who would enter into the center of it all, the very heart and mystery of Christ, into the center of the flame that consumes, purifies, and sets everything aglow with peace, joy, boldness, and extravagant, furious love. This, my friend, is what it really means to be a Christian.”
And there was a second quote that I came across while researching Brennan Manning: “The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips and walk out the door and deny Him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.”
Both of these quotes point to the same truth, albeit from different angles: one positive, the other negative. But they both tell us the same thing: Faith, as the book of James tells us, without works is dead. As the first quote makes quite clear, putting faith into action is not simply about merely doing. It’s not about spiritual busy-work. It’s about passionate burning love. Or, as Manning so beautifully phrases it, “the very heart and mystery of Christ, … the flame that consumes, purifies, and sets everything aglow with peace, joy, boldness, and extravagant, furious love.” I especially like that last bit: “extravagant, furious love.” When was the last time you allowed yourself to love extravagantly? Furiously, even?
I know. I know. It’s not easy. Because that kind of love? It takes a lot of energy. The kind of energy that can be hard to come by anymore, because there is so much that has become exhausting about life. A war in Ukraine that continues to grind on and on. The 169 mass shootings that have occurred thus far this year. It doesn’t even register in the national conscience anymore unless the perpetrator manages to put up really high numbers. And, of course, political tension and conflict are as bad as ever, bringing division and strife to families, congregations, even entire communities. And the persistent evil of racism continues to make itself known and felt throughout the country. Anxiety about the economy and our financial future... It’s the greatest hits of worry and trepidation. And the hits just seem to keep on comin’.
Is it any wonder, then, that mental health crises are on the rise? It’s the natural outcome of always being on guard, always being on the lookout for the next calamity. We are exhausted. We are wary. We are anxious. We are maybe even fearful. All of which means that we are the perfect audience for today’s reading from the
Gospel of John, because our emotional condition is not all that different from that of the disciples.
Our story picks up in the middle of Jesus’ final evening with the disciples. He’s already foretold his betrayal. He’s already predicted Peter’s three-fold denial of him. And what we have here is part of his final promises to his friends. He gives them a promise of comfort and guidance to come, right before they step out into the darkness of his arrest and crucifixion. Jesus says to the disciples, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.” Can we just take a moment and hear the tenderness in those words? The kindness? The depth of patience, perception, and forbearance Jesus offers his disciples? He doesn’t burden their frightened, skittish, saturated souls with more than they can handle. Instead, he promises them the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of truth, the Spirit of ongoing revelation. That Spirit will guide the disciples — and by extension, all of us — into a fuller knowledge and comprehension of everything Jesus left unsaid.
The key thing for us, here, is that the promise of the Spirit does not come to completely faithful, courageous people, already loving one another and the world boldly, already worshiping in spirit and truth. It comes amidst confusion and fear, which has made them unable to grasp what he is saying. Jesus makes the promise of the Spirit at the very moment when that kind of grace seems completely beyond their grasp.
As we contemplate what it is to which God is calling us, Jesus’s promises a safe and gentle place from which to begin. So, we don’t have to understand everything right now. We don’t have to find the perfect solution to the difficulties that face us, nor do we need to have a fully formed idea as to what God is calling us to do and to be. What Jesus is doing is calling us into the mystery of God. And before that great and holy mystery that we call God, our first job is to stand in humility. Exploring the mystery of God means bumping up against the limits of human conception. It is to become speechless. It is fall to our knees and say, “I can’t hold the singularity, the otherness, the strangeness of this God. I can’t domesticate God. I can’t tame God." All we can do is seek the truth with our whole hearts, and trust that Jesus’s promise holds. All we can do is await the Spirit who will come and reveal God's truth to us in God's time.
The truth of God will always exceed us. The truth of God will always be more than our tiny, easily overwhelmed minds can bear. The truth of God will always confront, convict, and remake us, even as it soothes and affirms us.
But Jesus also promises the Spirit, if we allow ourselves to be open to it, will guide us and embolden us for love. The fire of the Spirit that burns within, urging us to live in ever greater fidelity to the omnipresent Word of God, pushing us to enter into the center of it all, the very heart and mystery of Christ, into the center of the flame that consumes, purifies, and sets everything aglow with peace, joy, boldness, and extravagant, furious love.
So, what happens when we embrace and allow ourselves to be embraced by this mysterious trinitarian, three-in-one God? We discover that God is dynamic. God is not static, but fluid. To borrow from Fr. Richard Rohr: “God flows, and God is flow. God dances, and God is dance.” Whether we learn to tolerate the discomfort of divine fluidity or not, we worship a God who is always on the move, always spilling over, always organic, always a surprise. God’s coherence and unity don’t require God to be rigid.
We discover that God is diverse. If God exists in three persons, then each person has his or her own way of embodying and expressing goodness, beauty, love, and righteousness. As Richard Rohr puts it, the Trinity affirms that there is an intrinsic plurality to goodness. “Goodness isn’t sameness,” he writes in The Divine Dance. “Goodness, to be goodness, needs contrast and tension, not perfect uniformity.” If God can incarnate goodness through contrast and tension, then why can’t we? Why fear difference so much when difference lies at the very heart of who and what God is?
We discover that God is communal. It’s one thing to say that God values community, or that God thinks community is good for us. It’s altogether another to say that God is community. God is relationship, intimacy, connection, and communion. If God is interactive at God’s very heart — if Three is the deepest nature of the One — then what are we doing when we isolate ourselves from each other? God is Relationship, and it is only in relationship that we'll experience God’s fullness.
We discover that God is hospitable. In the 15th century, Russian iconographer Andrei Rublev created “The Hospitality of Abraham,” also known as “The Trinity,” one of the most well-known and beloved icons. In it, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (depicted as the three angels who appeared to Abraham near the great trees of Mamre), sit around a table, sharing food and drink. Their faces are nearly identical, but they’re dressed in different colors. The Father wears gold, the Son blue, and the Spirit green. The Father gazes at the Son. The Son gazes back at the Father, but gestures towards the Spirit. The Spirit gazes at the Father, but points toward the Son with one hand, and opens up the circle with the other, making room for others to join the sacred meal. As a whole, the icon exudes adoration and intimacy — clearly, the three persons around the table respect and enjoy each other. But it also exudes openness. There is space at the table for the viewer of the icon. For me. For us. For others.
We discover that God is love. The Trinity at its heart is an expression of deep, unfaltering, and life-giving love between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It’s not a relationship of domination, power-mongering, manipulation, or jealousy. It’s a relationship of unselfish, sacrificial love. Which begs the question: if God’s very being is grounded in love, and we are created in God’s image, then who are we? What are we? Are we, like the Triune God whose imprint we bear, creatures motivated by love? If we are not, then what are we doing with our lives?
“The gospel is absurd, and the life of Jesus is meaningless unless we believe that He lived, died, and rose again with but one purpose in mind: to make brand-new creation. Not to make people with better morals but to create a community of prophets and professional lovers, men and women who would surrender to the mystery of the fire of the Spirit that burns within, who would live in ever greater fidelity to the omnipresent Word of God, who would enter into the center of it all, the very heart and mystery of Christ, into the center of the flame that consumes, purifies, and sets everything aglow with peace, joy, boldness, and extravagant, furious love…”
AMEN