God is unifying love: a personal experience

The Trinity is not an abstract concept; the Trinity is a potential experience.

God the Trinity is three persons—Abba, Jesus, and Sophia—united through perfect love into one God. We are made in the image of God to overcome the illusion of our separation and reclaim our natural unity. In this series of essays, I am trying to think through this Trinitarian thought and its implications for ethics and life.

Trinitarian thought produces Trinitarian action, which produces the Trinitarian experience of graced time. The Greeks called graced time kairos. We can call it “eternity,” so long as we define eternity to be time-as-blessing.

In our experience, thinking, acting, and feeling are themselves triune, both one and three, distinguishable but inseparable. Each influences the others, as each is influenced by the others. And these three are entirely relational. The entirety of each is affected by the entirety of the others. Thinking, acting, and feeling are conceptually separable yet experientially united, distinguishable from yet perfectly open to their counterparts.

Trinitarian thought produces Trinitarian action which produces Trinitarian experience.

At the risk of self-congratulations, for which I apologize, I would like to share a Trinitarian experience. My church was on a mission trip to northern New York one summer, to do rural rehab on houses in an impoverished area of the country with brutal winters. We would try to fix up the houses and make them “warmer, safer, and dryer,” so their inhabitants would feel protected from the elements, and loved, even in a cold world.

I was partnered with Keith, a high school student who knew ten times more about construction than I did. At one of the houses we worked on, a small hole in the roof leaked water directly onto the bed of the six-year-old girl below. Any time it rained in the middle of the night, she would wake up sopping wet. At this point in our workweek, we had completed our main project on the house and had only one day left for projects. We could fix the girl’s roof only if we could do it in eight hours.

We decided to try. The program had galvanized steel panels available for a metal roof. The problem was their slipperiness. Keith and I needed to drill screws through the tin into the rafters, but we would slip while doing so and risk falling over the edge. The ground, mind you, was a perilous six feet below.

So, Keith and I figured out a system: standing next to each other, we grabbed the peak of the roof with our outside hands to keep from sliding. Then I held the screw with my inside hand while he held the drill with his inside hand. In this way we were able to attach the metal to the beams without falling off the roof.

Our activity was meaningful, purposeful, and united. I disappeared into the flow of the action so that, even though I was acting, the action felt effortless. Such was the coordination of our activity that Keith and I seemed to act as one, although the job could be achieved only by two. Time itself—the medium through which our activity occurred—flowed as gracious opportunity. Temporarily freed from the burden of our egos through the synthesis of our egos, we found that relationship—to the person you act with and the person you act for, the little girl below, watching us—can render time eternal.

Love is vulnerability, and within God, this vulnerability is absolute. It penetrates to the core of each divine person’s being, flows through that core, then surfaces again, unceasingly. The persons of the Trinity do not possess any independent, preceding identity that then enters into relationship with the other persons. Instead, every person depends, has always depended, and will always depend, on every other person for their divine being—as do we.

If God is anything in itself, then God is relationship itself, infinite relatedness expressed as interpersonal love mediated by time. When we participate in this divine reality, when we manifest God on earth, we may discover a Holy Spirit—an undertow of grace that bears us to our goal—God’s beloved community. And, if we look closely, we may see its image reflected in the eyes of a six year old girl who will be warm, safe, and dry next winter. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 61-63)