31. LIFE WITHIN THE TRINITY

   Over the course of centuries, Hosea's metaphor, which compared God's loving involvement with Israel to a marriage-union, yielded a language which describes love as a passionate, vulnerable, respectful and faithful involvement.  The application of the metaphor of intimacy which it encodes to life within the Trinity implies that the three divine Persons are so intimately involved that there is only one divine life.  But it also raises an intriguing question:  How were each of the three divine Persons involved in the decision to create the universe?

    As the previous Reflection indicated, the meta-narrative which has dominated the Christian tradition since the Protestant Revolution traces the Incarnation to a just judgment that a sin of Adam severed, irreparably, a natural relationship between Creator and creatures.  From that starting point, it asserted that divine mercy sought a way to repair the relationship.  In the resulting dance, divine justice had to decree that only a cruel and humiliating death of the Son could make the sort of reparation required to restore the relationship.  But divine mercy countered by urging the eternal Word to embrace that judgment.

    In this meta-narrative, neither justice nor mercy are personified.  In some ways, they rule life within the Trinity impersonally.  In marked contrast, an Incarnational theology traces the act of creation to an out-pouring (over-flow) of the intimate love of three Divine Persons.  Implicitly, it asks the question formulated above:  What was the role of each of the three divine Persons in the decision to create?

    On this feast of the Annunciation, I was struck by a vision of the dialogue within the Trinity that led to the birth of the eternal Word as a baby at Christmas.  In my experience, it is the indwelling Spirit who urges me to spontaneous actions which often involve me in intensely personal ways with persons I would rather have excluded from my life.  From this perspective, the Spirit moved the Father and the Word to share the divine life outside the Trinity in a creation consisting of finite entities.  And this urging required that the Word become incarnate, since words are meaningful only when they draw lines, posit distinctions of generated distinctive forms of life.

    In response to the urgings of the Spirit, the eternal Word embraced the Spirit's longing to share with finite human beings the intimate love shared by the three divine Persons.  In this admittedly whimsically account of the dialogue that led to the Incarnation, the Father had to go along with the project of the indwelling Spirit.

    That project can be succinctly defined:  At birth, human beings are plunged into a journey into the unknown.  Since they must use an everyday language acquired through socialization to process their experience, they cannot escape from the definition of what it is to be fully human and to live with integrity transmitted by the formative power of that language.  But those who commit themselves to a shared journey with Jesus, the way, the truth and the life, soon recognize the flawed existence fostered by any language at hand.  And they become aware that, if they want to enter into a journey to deepening intimacy with Jesus, they must allow the movements of the indwelling Spirit in their tangled depths to inform their involvements with one another, as Jesus, fully human as well as fully God, did.

    In this context, I have been endlessly intrigued by Harold Bloom's suggestion that the stories compiled in the Jewish Scriptures depict not only a God of new beginnings, but also a God whose search for unique individuals willing to embrace life fully was constantly disappointed.  This reading effectively exposes the ways that TV evangelists assure those who support them financially that they are protecting a version of the covenant which includes them among the elect.  But their understanding of the life of the elect makes no contact with the prophetic call to embrace the quest for a fully human and uniquely personal existence.  And as an honest searcher, I could not survive in a small world governed by these evangelists.