Trinity: God’s Outrageous Love
As I prayed with this feast, I took a trip down memory lane and landed in 1970. More than 50 years ago, there was a deeply touching movie. I bet some of you remember the film, Love Story. And the soundtrack plays in my heart (with a minor one-word adjustment) when I think about the Trinity.
The song begins with, “Where do I begin to tell the story of how great a love can be? The sweet love story that is older than the sea. The simple truth about the love God brought to me. Where do I start?”
The Trinity is the first and the most profound love story ever. I dare say it is the heart of every love story we have been blessed to embrace in our lifetime. Each time we have loved another, we echo the love of God, which is the Trinity.
When we love the spouse who completes us, the soulmate who knows the depth of our passion and pain, the parent, child, or best friend we cherish, we are a living repetition of the love of God. We are the human embodiment of the Holy Trinity.
Many have tried throughout the centuries to explain the Trinity. They have used diagrams, images, and analogies. And they were more or less successful. Frankly, most often, their explanations left me wanting.
As early as Tertullian, in the 2nd century, efforts were made to help people understand God in three persons. Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Catherine LaCugna, and Saint Patrick attempted to help people understand the Trinity. Process theologians tried words like primordial, imminent, and evolving in the twentieth century. In the end, the answer was always the same. Trinity is an unexplainable mystery.
A part of the difficulty of explaining the Trinity is that we start and end in the wrong place. I have never heard an explanation of Trinity that was not heady; they always begin and end with ideas, concepts, and theories. Maybe Trinity is hard to explain because it is not the stuff of concepts, ideas, and explanations. Trinity is of the heart. It is of the soul.
None of us can thoroughly explain love. Every set of words or images we use leaves us unsatisfied. Love is so deep in our soul that it is beyond words. But we know it when we feel it.
We all know what we experience when we love and are loved. When we love someone, their presence and even the thought of our beloved causes our hearts to throb. We know the pull of power in our emotions when their name is spoken. And anyone who has lost love to death knows that death has no control over love.
In my simple mind, without theology or lofty concepts. The Trinity is the fullness and absolute authority of pure love, the power of God’s love. It is uncontainable. God is a universal love volcano that erupts through Jesus and the Spirit. In the fullness of God’s outrageous love, the Lover comes to us in the ways we need Him most. He comes in Jesus to model love. God’s love transcends time and space through His Spirit, which remains with us always, even to the end of time.
Our human loves are God’s gifts to us. They are God’s love tokens given from the heart of the Lover to us, the beloved. Trinity is the bursting of God’s extravagant love that knows no bounds. As a lover whose extravagance will not be denied, God meets us as we are and fills our deepest desires.
The loves we are blessed to share in our fragile human lives enable us to know better the height, depth, and passion of God’s love for us. Our human loves are the pressed down and overflowing of God’s love. Our human love is an eternal echo of God’s unfailing love for us.
Through God, Creator Jesus, Redeemer, and the Spirit Sanctifier, our human loves are created, filled with compassion, and made holy. That is Trinity.
In God’s Unending Love,
Gwen
