Tomorrow (6/12/2022) is Trinity Sunday. For those of you who might not be quite as tuned into the Church calendar, we just had Pentecost last Sunday, which celebrates the coming of the Holy Spirit as recorded in Acts, chapter 2. We are entering the long, green season of Pentecost and “ordinary time” that comprises the bulk of the Church year. We won’t change seasons again until Advent comes around. The first Sunday after Pentecost is called Trinity Sunday, and it is a celebration of the holiest, deepest mystery of the Christian faith: the Trinity.
I’ve previously written about the Trinity here and here. Perhaps, I have successfully avoided any damnable heresy in those first two posts, and, if so, let’s see what happens today…
The Trinity is a doctrine about the nature of God. As such, it is inherently difficult to describe. I’ve written about that difficulty before. The Trinity transcends reason and transcends human experience, which is why the appropriate theological terms for this doctrine are transrational and transpersonal. Still, while this doctrine may describe the nature of God, it is a doctrine, a thought, a series of words thought up, defined, and discussed by humans. So, we have to be involved in the whole “shebang” (technical theological term, of course) in some vital way.
In my previous posts about the Trinity, I dug into the ways we approach this doctrine logically. If you know me, then that probably doesn’t surprise you. I have quite the pattern of trying to understand anything logically at least twice before trying anything else 😉
But, now I’d like to write a bit about a different approach.
The Trinity developed as a doctrine because people experienced God in a way that their current theology didn’t have a place or language to describe. I’ve talked about how Thomas begins that process of theological reinterpretation in his experience of the risen Jesus. Also, when the apostles experienced the coming of the Holy Spirit, all of their categories required reinterpretation.
Yet, long before logical thought would work these things out, these early Christians experienced an emotional response, and that is an area worth investigating. Recently, I’ve been reading about positive psychology, specifically in the book Positive Psychology for Your Hero’s Journey by Bruce W. Smith (stay tuned for later thought on the Hero’s Journey). In the early chapters of this book, Smith gives an overview of recent psychological investigations into positive emotions. One grouping that he defined struck me as having particular relevance for the Trinity – for our emotional responses to the persons of the Trinity.
Within the psychological research, three related positive emotions have been identified (among many others, of course) that have a bearing on how we, as mere humanpersons, can relate to the Godpersons of the Trinity.
(1) Awe — Smith defines “awe” as “an emotion which may motivate us to appreciate and learn from what is vast and beautiful” (p. 58). I suggest that this emotional response is helpful for us to relate to God the Father because awe (or my preferred term, wonder) leads us into the contemplative moment. While this moment may not seem like an “action” or “response” per se, it is a vital place of connection to the silence at the core of God and of ourselves (cf., 1 Kings 19:11-12). We need awe and silence to connect with God, and any subsequent action of devotion, justice, social compassion, and so forth comes from the inner reservoir that is only filled by this emotional response.
(2) Elevation — Smith defines “elevation” as an emotion “that people experienced when they saw someone do something good,” and it was reported to be felt as a physical sensation of “a warm or glowing feeling in the chest that motivates people to better themselves morally” (p. 59). I suggest that this emotional response is helpful for us to relate to God the Son, Jesus Christ, because we feel a calling to emulate his example (cf., Ephesians 5:1-2), as we read his teachings, miracles, life example, and death. Elevation may not be the only emotional response we have to Jesus, of course, but it is this emotional response that spurs us to action – to feed the hungry, stand up to the oppressor, to stand with the poor, and so forth.
(3) Inspiration — Smith defines “inspiration” as “an emotion that can stimulate us to do something creative or good” (p. 58). I suggest that this emotional response is helpful for us to relate to God the Spirit. Of all of the persons of the Trinity, the Spirit is the most difficult to encapsulate in an easy definition. However, the Spirit has always been semantically linked in Greek and Hebrew to wind and breath (cf. John 3:8). The word inspiration is one of the best examples in English of this type of semantic link, and – in less grammatical ways – this emotional response links our experience of God to the action of creativity. In a visceral, almost tangible, way, when we create something, we are participating in God – and that’s something that no logical theological explanation can fully describe.
So, while we may always struggle to understand logically the doctrine of the Trinity, we can remember that such logical explanations are only head games in trying to wrap our minds around what our emotional responses know intuitively. Awe, elevation, inspiration — these are our pure, emotional responses to the experience we call God, the Trinity.
Now, that’s something to think about…