Dear Friends,
Language. Christians have always struggled to find language that reflects our experience of God. There are ancient attempts to find a sign language for the Triune God: sun, sunlight, and heat; or clover—three leaves, unique and distinct, yet a single whole; water in its three phases—ice, liquid and steam. Yet all of these are flawed. All our language—even symbol and analogy—is just unable to capture the God we experience, the God we worship.
S. Augustine reminds us that the term Trinity was coined ‘not in order to give a complete explanation by means of it, but in order that we might not be obliged to remain silent.’ Fundamentally, speech about God the Trinity needs to go hand in hand with knowing that we do not know. Ultimately we only ever talk about God in allegory, because we have no other way of approaching the Divine. Naming God has always been about trying to encompass that which will not be.
That unlikely theologian, Donald Rumsfeld, put it enigmatically:
There are known knowns,
There are things we know that we know,
There are known unknowns,
That is to say there are things that we now know we don’t know,
But there are also unknown unknowns,
There are things we do not know we don’t know…
S. Paul said something not dissimilar, and that only in eternity will we come to see and know even as we are fully known.
For the time being, we can only speak from our experience of God. It is this experience—rather than any sort of abstract thinking—which gave birth to the doctrine of the Trinity. The Church named these experiences of God as Father, Son and Spirit. This naming, this describing of God, is to do with relationship, with encounter, with inter-relation. In the Trinity, relationship at the heart of God is affirmed. God who created us, in relationship reaches out to us in Christ Jesus, in relationship seeks to bring us nearer by the Spirit.
The season following Trinity Sunday returns us to ‘Ordinary Time’, marked by the colour of growth, nurture and renewal: green. However, we will celebrate next week something very other than ‘ordinary’: the significant milestone of Fr Bob Peck’s fiftieth anniversary of Ordination to the Priesthood. It is also, remarkably, his birthday and baptismal anniversary. Fr Bob will preside at the 10:00 am Mass, and I hope you will join the celebratory refreshments to follow.
May God bless you all.
Fr Tim Hurd
Trumpet material:For the next six weeks, while John De la Bere is away, Trumpet email and phone messages will be cleared only on Wednesdays and Thursdays. At other times please contact Dorothy Perkins (359 8518 or doromax@clear.net.nz).
