Cells in God's Being

A central tenet of Christianity is the Trinity.  I accept Trinity but I believe it is a mistake to continue to refer to God as three ‘persons’.  By continuing to refer to ‘persons’, defining ‘Father’ as the first person, we cannot help but conjure up the image of an old man with a long white beard looking down from afar.  I say there IS a God beyond our knowing, who had been manifested to humanity in three ways.

Creator God is the energy force of creation—of the entire Universe.  You can’t fit that into ‘a person’!  Can I understand God as a causal energy force?  Of course I can’t—but neither can I understand how falling water, or wind, or burning coal, or reflecting sunlight can be the cause of the electricity flowing through wires to light our homes and run our machines and computers at the touch of a button.  I don’t understand it yet I accept it.  So too, I believe God is the energy force of creation because I am here, and the world exists.  St. Paul states: ‘God is All in all.   All exists in God’.  The human person is of God and God is in the human person.  We are free to accept or reject that.

God as Savior chose to manifest the God-self as a human to demonstrate how we are to live this life and to give evidence to immortality.  Jesus was clearly ‘a person’, living the individuality of a singular human being, thus demonstrating the sacredness of our individuality.  He shared a limited existence in time.  Time is limiting, sequential, and one-directional.  Eternity is none of these.  Eternity is infinite, all encompassing and a totality.  God’s Being is in eternity.  Life and material being exists in God within that eternity but has the limit of time.  As Jesus, God accepted life’s limitations, in so doing, connected humanity to the God-self—then empowering God’s spirit to guide us if we but make that choice.  God never insists.

That spirit is the third manifestation of God, known as the Holy Spirit.  Teilhard de Chardin added to our understanding of Holy Spirit in his book The Divine Milieu. Divine of course refers to God.  Milieu is a French word that does not have an equivalent meaning in English.  A dictionary may define it as ‘environment’ but the meaning of milieu is so much deeper, it is the ‘everything’ that sustains one—the air you breath, sunlight, nature, the people and things that surround you.  Holy Spirit/Divine Milieu is God’s spirit of love and goodness that envelops us and seeks union.  It is ever-present.  The meaning carried by the term ‘divine milieu’ brings us to see more clearly that we are all connected.  We are of God, we live in God, and we each carry a spark of God within us whether or not we acknowledge and accept it.

We can say all this but it is beyond our ability to actually grasp, yet we are called to trust (have faith) that it is so . . . accepting that it is the key to a higher consciousness wherein we as a people come to recognize our interconnectedness and begin to live differently—emulating Jesus’ call to “Love God with your whole heart and soul and your neighbor as yourself.”

I like the analogy of humans as cells in God’s Being.

Trinity Thoughts

Throughout this Easter season I have thought much about the Trinity.  I find it does not present to me the great incomprehensible mystery theologians speak of – Why?

This is how my mind addresses it.

I am Barbara, one singular limited human being.  During my lifetime others have known me as different persons.  I can and have manifested myself in these ways:  I am parent—“Mom”; teacher—“Ms. S-C”; and writer—“B. Sabonis-Chafee”.  Because I am limited by my material reality and exist in time and space, those manifestations happen sequentially.  Although most people can and do experience me mainly as one or the other (and can even be unaware that I’m manifested differently to others at other times) I am always the same Barbara.

For God, there is not a limit.  The Eternal God exists beyond the limits of time and space.  God’s Being has been manifested to humanity in three ways: as Creator, Savior, and Spirit.  Christianity has chosen to identify those manifestations as: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Theologians have also chosen to label God’s different ways-of-being as ‘3 Persons’. The choice of terminology has effected our perception of and our ultimate understanding of God.

Consider the word ‘person’.   Unconsciously we bring our common understanding to it, which refers to a separate individual or ‘unit’ of being.   We know of a person as one who comes into life by way of two individuals joining in sexual union to produce a baby—or new unit of being—which is first dependent upon parents but develops (over time) into the new singular unit, independent of the source of their existence.

The vastness of God is beyond our ability to comprehend but we use what we do know to try to reach a degree of understanding.  During the two thousand years of development, the Jewish people became monotheists—believers in One God—and awaiting a Messiah.  The life and message of Jesus brought people to the belief that he was the promised Messiah, the Christ.  He preached love and peace, was crucified, died and arose—conquering death.  The Messiah, thus God’s presence had been manifested to the world.  Some of the Jews, then non-Jews became Christians, believers with the conviction that Jesus=God.  Then, experiencing another manifestation of God’s presence with Pentecost, accepted that Holy Spirit =God.  It took centuries to establish the tenets of Christianity.  One great problem (still considered the greatest Mystery) was how to reconcile monotheism with a Triune God of three different persons.  The world’s experience of God had been in three different ways as: creator, savior and spirit; these encounters were different experiences so, in thought, they were separated and given the labels of ‘Father’, ‘Son’ and ‘Holy Spirit’, calling them different ‘persons’ of God, creating the confusion of One God, but three ‘persons’.

God is beyond our knowing and those awarenesses that do come to our understanding are clouded by explanations we have invented.  When reason advances our understanding (consciousness?) it requires that we change our perceptions and relinquish the long-favored errors present in the explanation.  Faced with a change in perception it is imperative not to deny the essential experience or main point but realize the error was in the way it was explained. 

Regarding the Trinity, I suggest relinquishing the use of ‘persons’ to describe the differing manifestations—the ‘Person’ of God is God (I Am) One God.  God was manifested in an earthly sojourn as the human person, Jesus.  The Christian belief is that God did enter human form for a specific duration to share the experience of being human and demonstrate how we as humans can share in ‘godness’.  We can’t fully understand it, but history and scripture affirm that it happened.  God did not ‘leave’ eternity to become Jesus (making eternity absent of God).  Eternity holds all expressions of reality within itself, so God continues eternally while entering time’s temporality. 

How many ways can God manifest the God-self?  We can’t know that, so lets confine the issue to the ways in which humanity has recognized them.  God’s Being is manifested to our human world: 1) as Creator (we see and experience life and the world in which we exist); 2) as the Savior in the person Jesus, also identified as The Christ (saving us from limited being); and 3) as the Holy Spirit, (The Divine Milieu) present throughout all of creation, guiding our evolution.

My prayer:    God of the Universe, you are one God in three manifestations;

                          --as Creator you give us life and the world;

--as Savior you clothed yourself in human flesh and entered time to show us how we are to live

--as Holy Spirit you are everpresent, enveloping us in your love and giving guidance to those who seek your council.

            Thank you—for all that is

            Amen—Thy will, not mine be done
            Trust—I believe, Lord, help my unbelief