ACCEPTING THE TRINITY

Miriam Pollard writes, “How often do I sit down and decide to accept the Trinity? We think of God accepting us. We don’t realize he is up a tree unless we accept him. He can’t do much with the love he has for us until we give him permission to use it. This permission is not so easily given. We slide out of it.

OK, I will try to allow you to love me. I accept. I give you permission to be yourself. It’s not that easily said, not that easily meant. It’s scary.

I won’t look away from the knowledge you have given me of what, of who you are: this embarrassing complexity that I can’t understand, that… I might say it softly… I am almost bored with. The Trinity. Jesus, Lord Christ, I am not good with abstractions and Trinitarian theology sounds like an abstraction to me. But the Trinity is not theology. Theology is our clumsy way of trying to figure it out.”

When God, the Trinity, becomes abstract and so big as to be unreal we have a tendency to be uninterested, or almost bored as Pollard says, because it is so big, so unknown… so inhuman.

The Trinity is only slightly understood by seeing and knowing the human Jesus. None of us are really very good with a certain level of abstraction.

“No one has ever seen God. The only Son, who is the same as God and is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.” Jesus