It’s Trinity Sunday, and for most of us the concept of the Trinity is confusing and even a daunting idea to comprehend. This one God broken into three aspects may not seem as monotheistic in the way our brain would like to comprehend. Eleventh-century theologian Maimonides held that God so far exceeds our capacity to have knowledge of the divine nature that we are severely limited in how we describe or comprehend God. What we think we understand about God cannot surely relate to or even define what is entirely true regarding Yhwh. Therefore, our dualistic mindset ceases to understand a God of three and how it is incorporated in our worship and livelihood.
To quote Richard Rohr, “The Trinity perfectly illustrates the dynamic and interactive principle of three and was made-to-order to demolish our dualistic thinking and to open us to the mystical level. The fourth-century Cappadocian Fathers tried to communicate this notion of life as mutual participation by calling the Trinitarian flow a ‘circular rotation’ (perichoresis) among the three. They were saying that whatever is going on in God is a flow that’s like a dance. And God is not just the dancer; God is the dance itself! Then the Incarnation becomes a movement outward and downward. Jesus comes forth from the Father and the Holy Spirit to take us back with him into this eternal embrace, from which we first came. The circle dance broadens; we are invited to join in and even have participatory knowledge of God through the Trinity. Trinity is the very nature of God, and this God is a centrifugal force, flowing outward and then centripetally drawing all things back into the dance.”
It is hard to fathom God as mysterious, but in some ways it is comforting to know God invites us into the mystery. As people who demand to know all and understand everything, we are invited into a dance which asks us to lay down our dualistic thinking and see the world through the circular rotation of God. Invited to dance, invited to act, invited to share a resemblance of God in the inward and outward motifs of our lives.
This Trinity Sunday, may you tell yourself it is OK to join in the unknown mystery of how God three-in-one is working in the world and choose to dance along with it.