1 From Ruth Frey at Trinity Episcopal, NY
What matters about the Trinity is that God is a relationship. God is a relationship within Godself: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (or Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer). Just as God is relational within Godself, we are called to be in loving relationship with God and one another.
However, what matters about the Trinity is that God is a relationship. God is a relationship within Godself: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (or Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer). Just as God is relational within Godself, we are called to be in loving relationship with God and one another.
2 From the SALT Project
Accordingly, the idea of the Trinity casts a vision of God as deeply, irreducibly relational: the one God is constituted by three ongoing relationships. And if we take Genesis 1 seriously, and human beings are created in the imago Dei, then in our own way, we must be fundamentally relational, too, constituted by our relationships with God and one another. This is an important message to proclaim in an era too often dominated by individualism, loneliness, racism, and other forms of division. First, the doctrine of the Trinity insists that God is “up there, down here, and everywhere,” even in the shadows of grief and violence, calling all of us toward justice and love. And second, the doctrine of the Trinity reminds us all that relationships — even and especially relationships across differences — aren’t just something we “do.” Relationships are who we are. If our relationships — person-to-person, and also neighborhood-to-neighborhood, group-to-group — are healthy, then we’re healthy. If they’re not, then we’re sick, and require healing and restoration.
3. Here’s one more practical vision of the Trinity, this one from C.S. Lewis. Imagine “an ordinary simple Christian” at prayer, Lewis says — his voice crackling over the airwaves in one of his famous radio addresses (the same reflections he eventually collected into the book, Mere Christianity). Her prayer is directed toward God — but it is also prompted by God within her in the first place. And at the same time, as she prays she stands with and within the Body of Christ (recall how Christians typically pray “in Jesus’ name”).
In short, as this “ordinary simple Christian” prays, God is three things for her: the goal she is trying to reach, the impetus within her, and a beloved companion along the way — indeed “the Way” itself. Thus for Lewis, “the whole threefold life” of the triune God “is actually going on” around and within her — and as she prays, she “is being caught up into the higher kinds of life,” which is to say, into God’s own life, three and one, one and three (Lewis, Mere Christianity, 4.2).