Trinity Sunday 2020
The architect of the Parliament building in Canberra, Romaldo Giurgola was, apparently, fond of saying “great buildings begin with great ideas.” In other words, if you can’t imagine the possibilities first, the end result will not be all that significant. “Great buildings begin with great ideas.” It’s an observation that underscores the power and the importance of the imagination in our life. “You must give birth to your images,” wrote Rilke. “They are the future waiting to be born. Fear not the strangeness you feel. The future must enter into you long before it happens.”[1] The future begins in our imagination, in the images that we carry deep within us.
We are often used to downplaying our imagination. We say things such as ‘it’s only in your imagination.’ But, nonetheless, the images that we carry do determine so much of the way we see things, and the way we react to life, and the way we behave in life.
Our faith itself begins firstly in the imagination, as Kathleen Fischer elucidates.[2] It was on the level of the imagination that we formulated our initial response to the encounter with God. Faith finds its expression as myth and ritual, symbol, sacrament, image and story. Each of us carries an image of God through which we relate to God. But our image of God is more than just a private affair. There is such a powerful connection between the way in which we imagine something and our behaviours. Human deeds begin in the imagination. To imagine God one way, is to act in a certain way.
The image of God that we have as followers of the Risen Lord is that of the Trinity. And this image makes all the difference. The Trinity is the central mystery of our Christian faith: the uniquely Christian understanding of God that we have. As Christians we imagine God as Trinity. No other symbol captures the Christian experience of God which is at one and the same time of wild urgency and delicate intimacy, as the late Celtic writer, John O’Donohue would pen.[3] How else can this experience of God as wild urgency and delicate intimacy, this experience of God as so deeply and overwhelmingly relational, be expressed other than through this image of a Tri-unity. Through Jesus we have dared to imagine God as Trinity, as this Mystery of Persons in Relationship. The Christian God is Community where there is eternally, mutual dialogue, where each person is defined by their relationship to the other, and cannot be thought of apart from the others, where each person is fundamentally for the others, with the others and in the others.
And yet, most of us keep slipping back into pre-christian images of God, imagining God as some great individual Subject with monarchical characteristics. At worst, we have learnt to pray and to relate and to speak of God as the omnipotent, universal monarch. Yet, as Christians we only know God through Jesus: “the one visible image of the invisible God” (Col 1:15). Jesus is the Way who teaches us what God is like (John 14:6). And through Jesus we have dared to perceive God not as Monarch, but as Community.[4] And that makes the world of difference. As the late Cardinal Carlo Martini used to teach, conversion is a change in our image of God.[5] Conversion is a shift deep within our imagination.
As we have said, our images of God are not incidental. There is such a powerful connection between the way in which we imagine things and our behaviours. To worship the Christian God, the God of Triune Relationship, means that we are to become deeply relational persons. It means that we discover God in and through our relationships and not apart from them. It means that we cannot come to God apart from our relationships. For the Christian, a life without relationship is a life of heresy. To worship the Christian God means that we live in constant openness to the other with hearts deeply marked by hospitality. This image of God leads us constantly outwards in the project of discovery. It means that we value our relationships in such a way that they keep urging us to move outwards to widen the circle of relationship. Because this is how it is for God. To worship the Christian God means that our life together is always marked by the tension of unity and diversity, never one without the other. Because in God’s own life, there is unity and diversity eternally.
All of this finds its most practical presentation in two foundational sources of Christian life: our family and our community. Our family, which we call the domestic Church, is the primary icon of the Trinity: the love of two people, husband and wife, finding expression in the generation of new life. It is in our families, too, vulnerable though they may be that we first learn our identity as relational, that we learn our need of others, and that we learn the most important lessons of how to relate. But our community too is essential. Community is faith’s hearth. We cannot live our faith genuinely without community. For if our God lives in and through the community of being, in a communion of life, then we too must find God through our commitment to create and sustain community with all of its possibilities and tension. Indeed, it is our incorporation into a living community of faith, with all of its strengths and weaknesses, that will demonstrate whether we truly do believe in God as Trinity or otherwise. We cannot believe in the Trinity and act as if community were incidental. That is why celebrating the Solemnity of the Trinity on this very Sunday on which we can come back together as a community, albeit in a limited way, has such a remarkable poignancy about it, and why it is so special on this very day to be able to welcome our RCIA candidate into full communion with us.
We know only too well that both our families and our communities are never perfect. In fact, quite the opposite. We stumble and we stutter, to use the phrase of the famous St. Augustine. And yet, it is precisely the messiness of it all that indicates whether we are putting our trust in either a fantasy or something living. We believe in a living God, not just an idea. Therefore, we put our confidence in the relationships before us with all their ambiguity, and we work to forge communion in the midst of them all. The famous Jesuit Scripture scholar, Walter Burghardt, put it similarly in a homily he once gave at a baptism.
“Sonia Maria, before we welcome you through symbol and ritual into this paradoxical people, this community of contradictions, let me make an uncommonly honest confession. In the course of more than half a century, I have seen more Catholic corruption than most Catholics read of. I have tasted it. I have been reasonably corrupt myself. And yet, I take joy in this Church, this living, sinning people of God; I love it with a crucifying passion. Why? In spite of all the Catholic hate, I experience here a community of love. For all the institutional idiocy, I find here a tradition of reason. For all the individual repression, I breathe here an air of freedom. In an age so inhuman, I touch here tears of compassion. In a world so grim and humourless, I share here rich joy and earthly laughter. In the midst of death, I hear an incomparable stress on life here. For all this apparent absence of God, I sense here the presence of Christ. I pray, Sonia Maria, that your life within this community, your experience of a strange God and a still stranger people, will rival mine.”[6]
Yes, in all the ambiguity and paradox of our family life and the life of our community, we get the glimpse of God’s being as a communion of life. And it is this experience of communion which is Jesus’ eternal promise to us. The Trinity imagines life with altogether new possibility. Great buildings begin with great ideas. Great lives begin with great images.
[1] Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 1934.
[2] Kathleen R Fischer, The Inner Rainbow: Imagination in Christian Life, 1983.
[3] This tension was a constant theme in O’Donohue’s writings. See for example, “The Priestliness of the Human Heart,” in The Way Supplement 83 (1995), 51: “In the Trinity the pure wildness of the unknown surges within the intimacy of personal form.”
[4] See Jurgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, 1981.
[5] Carlo Martini, “Christian initiation and fundamental theology: Reflections on the stages of Christian maturation in the primitive church,” in Rene Latourelle & Gerard O’Collins (eds.), Problems and perspectives of fundamental theology (New York: Paulist Press 1982), 59-68.
[6] Quoted in Chester Gilles, Roman Catholicism in America, (Columbia University Press, 1999), 7.
