Trinity Sunday

Jesus asked his disciples, Who do people say that I am? And his disciples answered and said, ‘Some say you are John the Baptist returned from the dead; others say Elias, or other of the old prophets.’ And Jesus answered and said, ‘But who do you say that I am?’

Peter answered and said, ‘You are the Logos, existing in the Father as His rationality and then, by an act of His will, being generated, in consideration of the various functions by which God is related to his creation, but only on the fact that Scripture speaks of a Father, and a Son, and a Holy Spirit, each member of the Trinity being coequal with every other member, and each acting inseparably with and interpenetrating every other member, with only an economic subordination within God, but causing no division which would make the substance no longer simple.’

And Jesus answering, said, ‘What?’

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This joke that has been circulating this past week on the internet amongst preachers scratching their heads as they prepare their sermon on the Trinity, sums up the difficulty of articulating that which stands at the centre of our faith, the doctrine of the Trinity. It uses all the highfaluting words and images that theologians over the centuries have come up with leaving us with the same response as Jesus, ‘What?’

So I turn to some of my favourite theologians. Even they struggle to articulate this mystery. Leonardo Boff, an eminent Brazilian theologian says quite simply of the Trinity: ‘The Holy Trinity is a sacramental mystery. As sacramental, it can be understood progressively, as the Trinity communicates itself and the understanding heart assimilates it. As mystery, it will always remain the Unknown in all understanding, since the mystery is the Father himself, the Son himself and the Holy Spirit itself. And the mystery will last for all eternity.’ (1)

Nonetheless , I came across a story that can at least give us something to chew on while we love the mystery of the Trinity.

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A 2000 novel, Chang and Eng by Darin Strauss, can provide a concrete example of the flow of energy, the give-and-take that happens between the three persons of the Trinity who are, at the same time, one.

Chang and Eng, are probably the world’s most famous Siamese or conjoined twins for the simple reason that their lives were exploited from the time they were little boys. Born in Thailand (known as Siam then) in 1811 on a squalid houseboat in the Mekong River, Chang and Eng were initially taken away from their parents to be entertainment for the King of Siam. From there, after a short spell home, they became, for all practical purposes, slaves to a hawker by the name of Hunter who brought them to New York City in the 1830s. When P.T. Barnum expressed interest in their becoming one of his acts, they struck out on their own. Eventually they settled down in Wilkesboro North Carolina and married sisters. The two of them fathered twenty-one children and lived through the Civil War. In 1874 Chang died first, Eng following him several hours later. They were 63.

Throughout the novel, Darin Strauss plays with the ideas of individuality, personhood, autonomy and unity. Most of the time he refers to the five-to-seven-inch cartilaginous bond between the twins as the ‘band.’ Choosing to narrate the book from one twin’s point of view, he uses Eng—the more articulate, more introverted twin to speak about what it is like to live no more than seven inches from his brother.

No one knows how to call the twins. Most of the time they are called the ‘double-boy.’ When people are not calling them the ‘monster,’ they refer to the two as ‘it.’ Chang, in his less-than-perfect English, speaks of the two as, ‘Eng and I is happy.’ In this case, the grammatical mistake doesn’t seem to be so grave. Though people may think they are clumsy, the two are quite graceful. Eng describes one event that happens while they are sailing from Thailand to America:

Chang and I, never out of step, fretted our way through the labyrinth of men and ropes and masts and rails. I could hear my brother almost chuckling through his heavy breathing when suddenly we came to an open hatch in the deck.

What happened next was as natural as birdsong in a North Carolinian wood, but it left the sailors openmouthed, as if we had lifted the very ship in our hands. When conjoined people are running and suddenly there’s nothing underfoot but twenty feet of uninterrupted air, a moment’s disharmony—when one twin hesitates and his brother jumps—could mean death.

But it is different with Chang and me. Our intrinsic appreciation of one another’s body creates a spark in our shared blood that smoothes differences and brings the universe into our own current.

The two of us vaulted together with the grace and harmony of a bounding deer and its reflection in a still pond, clearing the open hatchway in unison and landing safely on the far side to continue our run. A look over our shoulders revealed that our pursuer was standing before the hatch, wheezing and resting his hands on his knees.

As Straus makes clear in the novel, though the two share a stomach, they are fully autonomous. Though they move as one, they are two. Chang’s thoughts are as unknown to Eng as his are to Chang’s. As Eng says early on in the book, ‘Nailing down a personality is as easy as pinning marmalade to a wall’—even when it’s someone to whom one is attached permanently (6). (2)

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And so it is with the Trinity. We run the risk of falling into two theological traps when we try to speak of the Trinity. The first, which is common in the West, stresses the one nature of God at the expense of the reality of the persons; the second, common in the East, emphasizes the distinct reality of the persons but does not articulate the oneness of God.

How do we speak of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit and make sense of it? What do we mean when we say, The three in one and one in three, the holy and undivided Trinity?

Perhaps the honest thing to do is admit that it is a mystery. And perhaps it helps to remember the 14th century Meister Eckhart’s wonderful description of the Trinity: ‘When God laughs at the soul, and the soul laughs back at God, the persons of the Trinity are begotten. To speak in hyperbole, when the Father laughs to the Son, and the Son laughs back to the Father, that laughter gives pleasure, that pleasure gives joy, that joy gives love, and that love gives the persons of the Trinity of which the Holy Spirit is one.’ (3)

One thing is sure—when we come together for eucharist, the Three in One and One in Three are with us and fill our being. As they dance together, their energy flowing from one person to the next, round and round until it is indistinguishable, let our souls be filled with their joy and love, and share in the holy dance.

END NOTES

Leonardo Boff, Trinity and Society (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1988), 237.
Darin Strauss, Chang and Eng (New York: Penguin/Plume, 2000), 160.
Paul S. Fiddes, Participating in God: A Pastoral Doctrine of the Trinity (Knoxville: WJKP, 2000), 12.