There is an old story about Saint Augustine walking along a beach and musing on the Trinity. As he walked he met a boy who was digging a hole wherein he would contain the entire ocean. When Augustine remarked on the impossibility of his task the boy replied that the saint's efforts to explain the Trinity were equally futile.
Tomorrow is Trinity Sunday, and St Augustine's encounter with the boy forewarns a difficulty. For no matter how eloquent a preacher may be, no matter how leaned a theologian may be, no matter how wise a mystic may be, they also form a trinity - three persons and one mystery! Explaining the mathematical conundrum of three persons being distinct and yet being one is not easily done.
Sometimes words simply do not carry the ideas we want to speak about. That is a fact. There are important areas of our lives that we cannot describe because we do not have words to explain what we sense or know. After all, can anybody explain exactly what yellow is to a man born blind? Who knows what time and infinity are? Can somebody define what love is? Isn't it humbling to know that we still need analogies to communicate with each other in our shorthand world?
Analogies bring out the most creative side of the human person. When a person can concoct a good analogy it can say so much more than words. This is the reason why language doesn't attempt to provide words for every situation. There are some parts of life (normally the important ones) that are so important they deny definition. To trap them beneath a word would destroy their inherent beauty. A good analogy says so much that its hearers will appreciate the wonders behind it; a bad analogy collapses and slumps. Maybe it's the fear of the slump that deters us from seeking analogies. Certainly the feast of the Holy Trinity challenges every preacher to come up with a relevant analogy.
Meister Eckhart used the analogy of a cooking pot to explain his understanding of the Trinity. It's a bit removed from our familiar shamrock story, but it is nonetheless interesting. The Trinity is like a boiling skillet! Eckhart saw the Creator and the Word as seated together in a skillet. The love between them was the Spirit and the dynamism of that love generated heat. The pot boiled over and spilled out; and that is creation! As a result of all this, all created beings aware of the pot, each one of us knows what was there, each one desires to return to it, but none of us have the words to capture that desire. For Eckhart, we all know what the Trinity is, we all now how it operates. None of us can explain it but we can evoke its memory in every created being.
Maybe the Trinity is like the friendship between two elderly people sitting quietly together. Each enjoys a separate and particular personality yet the bond between them is spirit and they are as one. Or maybe the Trinity is like a book - a timeless combination of ideas, words and life in a single volume. Or maybe the Trinity is like an artist, a creative, active and inspiring individual. The list is endless.
But as imaginative as analogies are, they fail to define the Trinity. The problem lies in trying to find that word that distinguishes three persons from three people! It probably doesn't exist. Reality doesn't draw a distinction between persons and people; it probably doesn't see the need to. Maybe we cannot define, but we can try to explain.
It appears to me that the boy on the beach was right!
F. MacE.