Vocation

In my anthropology 101 class, we’ve been talking about trying to make the familiar unfamiliar. In other words, we look at our lives and point out the absurdity or strangeness of the things we take for granted.

So with this in mind, I’ve been thinking about the Trinity a lot this week and was reminded of how strange the concept really is. I mean, how can we have three entities that we call God and still manage to be monotheistic? Even though we say that all parts of the Trinity still only make one God, we also say that each part is divine. To outsiders, I’m sure this smells suspiciously like polytheism.

Trying to explain the Trinity always manages to give me a headache: there is only one God, but there are three persons that make up that one God. Two parts of God are somehow father and son, and in all four gospels, God the Father blesses God the Son with God the Holy Spirit. If that isn’t confusing enough, God the Son dies, which is something you would think would prove that God the Son is an entirely different entity than God the Father and God the Holy Spirit. And yet, among all of this, we still say that these are not three separate gods, but one God. And I love that.

I love that God is so mysterious and unknowable that we can’t ever truly understand God’s nature and I love that God is not personified as a rigid figure ruling from on high, but comes among us in various forms. I love the freedom that comes with having a part of God (the Holy Spirit) that I don’t associate with a gender. I love that I can experience God on multiple levels at once, that I can feel the Holy Spirit moving through me while I pray to God the Father in Jesus’s name. I love that God isn’t something that we can cram into an arbitrary category or pin down with a single label. And I love that our feeble attempt to explain the nature of God needs a lot of explaining of its own. Because in the end, God is beyond explanation, beyond labels, beyond categories, and beyond divisions. No matter how we think of or try to explain God, we will always come up short. I think that’s my favorite part about the Trinity—it never ceases to remind me how little I know about God and how absurd it is that I try to understand God anyway.

So, while the idea of the Trinity may be completely absurd, I think it’s the framework on which my faith is built. It probably has flaws, but it gives me space to pull away from categories, fall into the mystery of God, and grow in faith. And that’s enough for me.