Doing the Circle Dance

Pop quiz:

Consider the following situations and apply the proper term to each:

First, a mosquito lands on your arm and, feeling it alight, you slap it with your hand. Have you committed murder or manslaughter?

Answer: If you premeditated your attack on the mosquito, grabbing a fly swatter as a weapon, sneaking up on it and such like, you committed murder. Reactively slapping the little bugger out of momentary panic is manslaughter.

Second: You’re traveling in your car on a back road in the boonies, listening to a radio with crackling static in the background on which a song plays that prominently features stringed instruments played with a bow. Are you listening to AM or FM radio, a fiddle or a violin, and is the music bluegrass or country?

Answer: If you hear static, it’s probably AM radio. It’s the same instrument at a symphony or a hoedown, but if the devil goes down to Georgia with one, it’s called a fiddle. And if you hear more mandolin, fiddle and banjo than guitar, bass and drums, you can call it bluegrass.

Third, you’re living in 19th-century England and helping to lace up your wife’s corset which, you, being an inattentive cad, pull too tight. She hits the floor unconscious. Has she fainted or has she passed out?

Answer: Prudence has likely fainted there in the parlor, indicating a short period of unconsciousness. (Victorians called it “the vapors.”) Passing out is more like deep sleeping and often involves an insurance claim.

Subtle differences, you say? Six and a half-dozen are the same? Not so fast.

Understanding and using proper terminology involves lots of nuances.

When some friends from India traveled around California on business, they left their 11-year-old daughter with Anne Spivack and her husband. Curious about going to church one Sunday morning, the young girl decided to go along. When they returned home, Anne’s husband asked the kid what she thought of the service.

“I don’t understand why the West Coast isn’t included, too,” she replied. When they inquired what she meant, she added, “You know, in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the whole East Coast.”

No, the Trinity is not exactly an easy concept to grasp.  Lots of subtle nuances.

So what exactly is the difference between the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost?

As Christians, we describe ourselves as monotheistic — we believe in one God. But we also affirm the deity of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit and a person frequently identified as “God the Father.”

Sounds like three Gods, not one God.

Many have tried over the centuries to explain this concept that the Bible itself doesn’t lay out with clear delineations and definitions. In fact, the word trinity doesn’t even appear in Scripture. Many children learn in Sunday school that the Trinity is like water — H2O — which can be a gas, a solid or a liquid but is still and always H2O at a molecular level, or the egg with its yolk, white and shell, or they learn St. Patrick’s shamrock metaphor.

The mathematical approach is also attractive, the equilateral triangle being the most popular math symbol for the Trinity. While 1 + 1 + 1 = 3 doesn’t work to explain the Trinity, 1 x 1 x 1 = 1 works a little better.

All these metaphors and explanations, though, fall short and we’re left with little satisfaction by way of explanation. Despite our best efforts at explaining the Trinity, a full understanding seems to elude even those of us who’ve been lifelong churchgoers. Church history itself reveals an eclectic and often violent debate over the metaphysics of the whole thing.

But here’s a thought: In our modernist desire to define all the terms correctly, maybe we’ve missed the idea altogether. Trying to use definitive terms to describe God is a bit like nailing Jell-o to a tree — eventually the thing falls apart. You might as well try to milk a fly or sneak sunrise past a rooster.

Human language has distinctive limits in trying to define the divine. So rather than carping about the nature of Father, Son and Holy Spirit (or Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer), maybe we should be focusing on the real essence of the Trinity — the power of relationships.

In today’s Epistle to the Romans, Paul doesn’t try to line out a systematic theology of how God works. He uses Trinitarian terms interchangeably — the Spirit, Father, and Christ — but doesn’t try to make it a treatise on metaphysics. Rather, Paul sees God at work in a uniquely relational way, both within God’s own nature and with humans.

After admonishing his Roman readers in verses 12-13 to discern the difference between living in the flesh (focusing on the self-oriented life) and the Spirit (focusing on the God-oriented life), Paul then shifts the language to relationships — that those who live by the Spirit are adopted by the Father as children of God and are co-heirs with Christ (8:14-17). Whatever the Trinity is in being, the purpose of God, the three-in-one/one-in-three, is to bring humans back into relationship with God, rescuing us from having to try to define ourselves through self-destructive pursuits.

You can approach this passage and others that seem to reference the Trinity in two ways: either you can try to figure out which Person of God is coming and going and doing what and when, like trying to determine a train schedule. Or, you can simply focus on the fact that God’s very nature, God’s being, God’s focus, is internally and externally relational.

Our connection with the Trinity is not to be a head trip where we simply meditate and ruminate about the nature of God, but a heartfelt, personal relationship with the Almighty.

That’s a different view of God than you can get from a chart. Perhaps we’ve made too much of the distinctive shape of the Trinity, which we see most often depicted as a triangle with three hard sides.

What about a different shape — an alternative description, a subtle shift of perception? John of Damascus, one of the early church fathers who lived during the late seventh and early eighth centuries, eschewed the calculated reasoning about the Trinity and came up with a wholly different term for the oneness and threeness of God — perichoresis, which loosely translated from Greek means “circle dance.”

In other words, the Trinity is not primarily defined by the distinctiveness or unity or “substance” of the persons involved, but rather as a circle — a dynamic community defined by love. To see one is to see all — to dance with one is to dance with all, being invited into the circle and into a love relationship where we see God face to face, as children hold hands and dance with loving parents.

If you think about it, a triangle can be turned into a circle by softening the three points.

Circles are natural, appearing everywhere from the sun and moon to the earth itself. Makes sense then, that we should be thinking of a circle as the dominant paradigm that shapes our understanding of God’s creative and relational nature. You can’t define a circle by its points. You can only define it as a whole.

The truth is that we’ll probably never understand the Trinity by trying to define it. The only way we’ll really “get” the Trinity is to join the circle and live into that relationship.

So go ahead – and get circular with God.