Oh no! It's June 7 soon!

Trinity Sunday rolls round again, and it hurts!

I'll dare to say it. As doctrine, the Trinity sucks. A doctrine is supposed to be a teaching that makes some important truth clear and memorable, so that we can all reach a Luther-like degree of conviction and say "Here I stand." We can all know what we're agreeing to.

So I dare to say that the doctrine of the Trinity is less than stellar because, for this little dumb bunny, it doesn't make the thing clear at all. I can recite the formula — one God, three persons — but that doesn't make it the least bit clear. It's confusing.

I discover I'm not alone in this. Lots of people are confused. And just when I think I'm getting a handle on things, I find that what I've been thinking is uncomfortably close to some ancient heresy.

Sometimes folks try to help with analogies (comparisons). Just as you can't have an egg without the shell, the white, and the yolk (they'll say), so God is only complete with all three persons. But of course, the analogy breaks down: the persons are not parts of God. Each is fully God. We'd have to say that the yolk is the whole egg. The shell too. Well, something's scrambled, and I think it's my brain.

And I know, too, that God is not a community of three, but a unity. Just the same, there is something I can understand coming from this three-in-one-ness: in some mysterious way, God is relationship, complete and en­tire within his unknowable self. And that's important because then it makes sense to say that God is love. Love requires relationship. And logically, per­fect love requires perfect relationship. In a different religion that imagined only a single person as god, that god could only know about love. He could not be love.

But since the God of Abraham and Isaac reveals himself to us as one God and three persons, somehow a "tri-unity", he is relationship, and he is love. Praise be!

PRW