A Trinity Sunday reflection — and a hint of where we’re headed
“They worshiped him, but they doubted.” —Matthew 28:17
There is a sentence in this Sunday’s Lectionary Gospel reading that won’t leave me alone. Eleven men climb a mountain in Galilee because a Risen Man told them to. There they witness him. And then Matthew, who could have given us a tidy triumph, instead gives us this: They worshiped him, but they doubted.
Not some of them worshiped while others doubted.
The same people, in the same breath, did both.
Adoration and uncertainty, fumbling together. And it is into this shuffling, hesitant huddle — not after they get their act together — that Jesus speaks the most expansive words in the whole Gospel: all authority is given to him, all nations are invited to apprentice into his Way, and Remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age. Baptizing those responding to this call, he says, into a Name with three folds in it: Father, Son, Holy Spirit.
For a thousand years, friends of God in the Way of Jesus have kept this first Sunday after Pentecost as the Feast of the Holy Trinity. And for at least three hundred of those years, a good many thoughtful people have wondered why we bother. Immanuel Kant, back in the 18th century, sniffed that “absolutely nothing worthwhile for the practical life can be made out of the doctrine of the Trinity, taken literally.” A bit later, the great theologian Karl Rahner observed — with more sorrow than scorn — that if the Trinity quietly disappeared from Christian life tomorrow, most Christians wouldn’t notice it was gone. We’d keep singing our songs, eating our potlucks. The furniture would still be there.
I want to make a different wager today. I want to suggest that the Trinity is not a piece of doctrinal furniture at all, but something far stranger and more useful that has been sitting inside the furniture this whole time, waiting for someone to turn it around and look at the back.
Cynthia Bourgeault tells a story I love about this, toward the opening of her The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three: Discovering the Radical Truth at the Heart of Christianity. An old couple in eastern Turkey receive a beautiful cabinet shipped from their son in Istanbul. They proudly display their best teacups on it. A visiting friend is puzzled: Why would the son spend a fortune on a tea cupboard? So she unscrews the backing, and finds, hidden inside, a fully operative ham radio. The cabinet was never about the teacups. It was meant to connect them to the one they loved. “That,” she writes, “is an unsettlingly apt analogy for how we Christians have been using the Holy Trinity.” We’ve been setting our prettiest theological china on top of a communications device of staggering range.
So let’s turn it around and look at the back. And to do that, let me take the long way round — through a particular patch of ground that keeps producing people who know how to dance.
Act I: A land that births dancers
Here is something that delights me, and that I came to feel in my own body when I traveled there, to one of my ancestral homelands: an awful lot of our deepest intuitions about a God-in-motion seem to leak out of the same stretch of dry Anatolian highland.
Go back to the fourth century, to Cappadocia — that lunar landscape in what’s now central Turkey, all wind-carved tufa cones and cave churches. Here three friends and kin — Basil the Great, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus, the ones we now call the Cappadocian Fathers — did something genuinely revolutionary, though they’d have been too busy to call it that. The Greek world had a perfectly good word, hypostasis, and an old theatrical word, prosopon — “mask,” the face an actor held up on stage. Borrowed, hollow, a role played and set down. The Cappadocians took that thin word and transmuted it. They made person the most real thing there is. Not a mask over some truer, impersonal stuff, nor an individual, walled off and alone. But a face that exists only in the turning-toward-another — being itself as communion. As one of their great modern interpreters, the late theologian John Zizioulas, puts it:
To be, truly, is to be in communion.
Outside of relationship there is no person at all; there is only an individual, and an individual, finally, is just a candidate for death.
Can you feel how radical this is? These Cappadocians were saying the ground floor of reality is not a lonely substance that later, optionally, decides to relate. The ground floor is relationship.
Love comes first, and makes the lovers.
Now walk a few centuries forward and a little south and east, to Konya — Rumi‘s city, where I have also stood. The whirling one witnesses isn’t performance; it is a doxology from head to quickly-moving toes.
One hand turned up to receive from heaven, one hand turned down to pour into the earth, the body itself becoming the hinge between the realms, turning and turning around a still center. Distinct language, a cousin faith, and yet — listen — the same intuition the Cappadocians had: that the Real is not a static One but a turning, a giving-and-receiving, and we become most ourselves not by clutching in place but by entering the motion.
Keep traveling forward in time and eastward in distance, up to the rough country near Kars, hard against the Armenian border, where in the 1860s or 70s a boy named Georgij Ivanovič Gurdžiev (known in the West as Gurdjieff) was born into that same Anatolian crossroads, of Greek and Armenian and Sufi and folk-Christian whisperings. He would spend his life claiming he’d recovered an ancient teaching about how reality actually moves: that nothing new ever arrives into being from two forces alone. Two forces lock, like wind against a sail, and the boat just rounds up and stops. Hegel’s endless derivatives and dialectical deadlocks offer us nothing genuinely new.
It takes a third — the hand on the tiller, a heading, a reconciling force — for anything to actually go anywhere. Gurdjieff called this ternary dynamism the Law of Universe Creation, or the Law of Three. And he insisted, with that trickster’s glint, that the Christians had been carrying this secret all along and forgotten what it was for. They’d been using it as a tea cupboard! (I dive more deeply into the Law of Three in last year’s reflection, Contemplation, Community, and Courageous Compassion: A Trinity Sunday Manifesto)
For now, just stand with me on this dry Anatolian ground a moment longer, and let it tell you what it tells everyone who lingers here: that the Real is not a noun but a verb. Not a thing to be possessed but a motion to be joined.
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