Trinity Sunday: Breaking The Silence

Breaking The Silence

“Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?”  -Adrienne Rich from her collection of essays titled Arts of the Possible. A new poet-friend, Kathleen O’Toole, shares this manner of putting the question in her latest collection, This Far. Having been an avid birder since grade school, and in the summer every day awakening to a symphony of birdsongs just outside the bedroom window, I find myself fascinated when O’Toole writes in her poem, From Birdsong:

On a Sierra Retreat, I’m enthralled with birds

and birdsong. I learn of avian constraint: birds

the same size, same shape, can only distinguish

themselves with song; of the mountain chickadee

singing threat with the number of notes in her call,

of golden eagles, navigating wind currents by memory.

Today a naturalist spoke of the risk that birds take

just to sing, revealing themselves to predators.

So when you hear a bird sing, she must have

something important to say. These days

when my mother speaks of Dad’s death, she says,

We thought we had at least another year.

       [Kathleen O’Toole, This Far, Paraclete Press:2019, p12]

The same may be said about the voice of God. God’s creative voice breaks the silence of chaos to say, “Light!” Later God breaks the silence of creation and says, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness…” Later, in the Garden, when the man and woman have eaten from the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, when suddenly they “heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden,” God calls out of the silence, “Where are you?” It’s a parental voice of concern breaking the silence of shame and fear.

Where are you? This is the one question God is always asking us. It is a question we would do well to put to ourselves. Where are we right now? As a people? As a nation? As those creatures created in the image and likeness of God, where are we? And now I find myself thinking, as it is with the avian crowd, God takes a tremendous risk in speaking to us at all. After all, will we listen? More importantly, will we hear? Do we even allow a moment’s silence in the busyness of our lives that could even be broken by God’s compassionate and curious voice?

Fortunately for us, there are those who have heard the voice of God and have recorded what they have heard. One of them, a 14^th century anonymous woman on her near-death bed heard God say: All shall be well. All shall be well. All manner of thing shall be well. Turns out there was more. She took the name of the church where she chose to live in a shed attached to the side of St. Julian’s in Norwich, England. She lived alone. With much silence I imagine. She heard God’s voice of compassion in that silence and she wrote it all down, first in a short version, a kind of outline; then in a longer version – the earliest surviving book in the English language written by a woman, Showings. Here is what she heard:

And so our good Lord answered to all the questions and doubts which I could raise, saying, comfortingly: I may make all things well, and I can make all things well, and I will make all things well, and I shall make all things well; and you will see yourself that every kind of thing will be well.

          [Julian of Norwich, Showings, Paulist Press: 1978, p 229]

And, as if that is not enough, she goes on to interpret what she has heard:

When he says ‘I may’, I understand this to apply to the Father; and when he says ‘I can’, I understand it for the Son; and when he says ‘I will, I understand it for the Holy Spirit; and when he says ‘I shall’, I understand it for the unity of the blessed Trinity, three persons and one truth; and when he says ‘You will see yourself’, I understand it for the union of all men who will be saved in the blessed Trinity. [Ibid]

Perhaps the most tender, insightful and eloquent reflection on the nature of God in the English language. What St. Athanasius sums up in 676 words, the voice Julian hears sums it all up in 58 words - 142 with the commentary. Perhaps, on Trinity Sunday this is all that needs be said about the Triune nature of God – this God who chooses to live as a community within a unity.

Julian refers to ‘three persons and one truth.’ Traditionally we sing things like, “God in three persons, blessed Trinity.” The clergy who struggled to put God into words in the creeds did not all speak the same language: some spoke Latin, some spoke Greek. They finally agreed on persona for the three natures of God: persona is the Greek word for the large masks that early Greek actors would use to portray their characters. One actor, then, could wear three different personas, yet behind the mask is just one person. The historic creeds all insist there is only one God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. This God has been experienced as having at least three personas: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

What Julian does, however, is to go a step further. The Showing, or Revelation, she heard describes these three personas as moving as one unity from potential to intention to action: I may, I can, I will, I shall is what she hears our good Lord say. Suggesting, better than perhaps any creed has so far, that God not only has potential (I may, I can), and purpose (I will), but actually shall act upon that purpose, which quite simply is to “make all things well.”

And that’s not all! “And you will see yourself that every kind of thing will be well.” We will see! Seeing, not as in “seeing is believing,” but rather seeing as experiencing the living God actually making all things well.  

Alas, there is implicit in this Showing of Julian’s that all things currently are not well. Yet, as Stanley Hauerwas reminds us in his collection, A Community of Character, we are those people who sustain the virtue of hope in a world that rarely shows much evidence that such hope is justified, for we are assured that the falseness of this world is ultimately bounded by a greater truth. This is what it means to be created in the image and likeness of a God who desires to make all things well. That is, we are to be co-creators of all that will be well for others, for ourselves, for all of creation. Way back in Genesis chapter 1 we learn that we are created in the likeness of the One who may, can, will and shall make all things well.

Suggesting that Trinity Sunday is as much about who we are and whose we are and what we are created to say and do. We are created with potential, intention, and the capacity for action that brings wellness to others and to the world. Like birds and God, when we break the silence, we take a risk. The silence we are called to break is the silence of injustice. The silence of prejudice. The silence of woundedness and hurt. The silence of fear. Yet, we are called to take the risk to break such silences in the name of Julian’s Triune God. And we are empowered to take such risks on the promise Jesus delivers to his remaining eleven disciples on a mountain top in Galilee, far away from the madding crowd in Jerusalem: Lo, I am with you to the end of aeon, to the end of the age, to the end of time. [Matthew 28:20]

It seems that God’s voice of compassion risks breaking the silence to let us know we are not alone. The God who can, who may, who will and who shall make all things well is with us now and forever. For those who listen in the silence will hear and are promised we will see that every kind of thing will be well! Amen.