The School of Charity
The other day I sat outside at the Shrine of St. Anthony
pondering just what there is to say about the Christian idea of God as Trinity
and Unity all at once. Not at all sure, I headed back to the car and on the way
I spied a small object on the ground: an orange Lego piece. I picked it up,
looked at it, and thought, “That’s it. The Nicene Creed that describes God as
Creator, Jesus and Holy Spirit all rolled into One Unity is the building block
or cornerstone of who we are and what we are meant to be doing! I’ve held on to
the Lego piece as a reminder.
As Bob Dorough once wrote for School House Rock, there is
something magical about the number three. We speak of time as past, present and
future. Yet, this does not really give us a full picture and understanding of
time; such as when it feels as if time stands still; or time seems to speed up;
certain times dissolve us into tears; other times give us great joy.
Three gives us heart, body and mind. Scripture, tradition
and reason. We come from love, we return to love, and love is all around. Faith,
hope and charity. Two people have a little baby, which makes three. A family. A
unity of three. Which leads us directly to Father, Son and Holy Spirit. A
blessed trinity, and yet, a unity of three. An expression of the nature of how Christian’s
view God, which itself has been re-stated since its formulaic development in
the Nicene Creed in our liturgy. “Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer” is commonly
used. Our Presiding Bishop likes to use, “Love, Liberating, and Life-giving
God!” And the New Zealand Prayer Book describes our God as “Earth-maker,
Pain-bearer, and Life-giver.” All are attempts to describe a Holy Family: God,
Jesus and Spirit, a family, and yet a Unity: three experiences of the One God.
People try to use metaphors people to describe this. How can
one God have three personae, some ask? It’s similar to water, that can also be
ice, and can also be vapor, but is still water. No metaphor, however, gives a
full picture and understanding of the One – the Unity, the One we call God. The
vastness of God is indescribable. Similar to when one heads out to western
Maryland, after ascending Sidling Hill, a long, steep, narrow mountain ridge in
the Ridge-and-Valley character of the Appalachian Mountains, one eventually
crests the top and begins a descent with a view of what seems an almost
infinite valley with some minor hills that is indescribably beautiful. There
are just not enough words to describe this view, just as no description of God
can ever fully describe our experience of what some call the Divine Love or
Charity of God.
And yet, we try. It confounds our fellow monotheists,
Muslims and Jews, that we describe One God with three descriptors. And perhaps
they are right. I have long struggled with this Trinitarian business most of my
life, having once refused to sign a copy of the Nicene Creed at my confirmation
– arguing that it seemed much too exclusive of other expressions of the mystery
we call God. I was told to just sign it because a Bible with my name embossed
in gold on the cover had already been purchased for presentation, and that “you
wouldn’t want to embarrass your family not to be confirmed.” I signed it, which
bothered me for a long time. I spent years fighting the urge to pick up the
phone and ask that that piece of paper be pulled from the files of First Congregational
Church, and sent to me so I could burn it and be done with it.
But as it turns out, the blessed Trinity is not done with me
yet! Lately, I find that each time I recite it some new experience of Divine
Charity emerges within me. Some dimension of God’s loving presence touches me
at a deeper place than ever before. God, Jesus, and the Spirit are never
through with us. Just as creation continues. New things seen and unseen
continue to come into focus and become a new reality, especially with the aid
of electron microscopes and the Hubble and Webb telescopes. The vastness of the
universe only begins to suggest the even greater vastness and depths of the
Creator; the One who is within all things and beyond all things all at once! That
yes! Our God is beyond us and within us all at once all the time.
The deeper truth of it all is that the revelation of God is
not dogma, not theology, not a doctrine – not even a belief. For us, the
Revelation of God is a person – a person whose every story and statement gives
us some deep truth about the life and will of our God – whom Evelyn Underhill long
ago described as Divine Charity in her writings about the Creed. [i]
We who are created in the image of God – imago Dei – are to become those people
who abandon self-love and the greed and acquisition that grows out of such
self-love, and become like Jesus, the human appearance of Divine Charity in
flesh and blood like ourselves – we are to become a giving, sharing,
self-emptying community of Divine Charity, sharing the unending, unqualified
love of our Creator with all people, and all nations, especially with all those
who are utterly unlike ourselves. Credo, which gets translated, “I believe,” in
the creed, really means, “I commit myself, I turn over my self over, to the God
of Divine Charity so that I too, like Jesus before me, can share the fullness
of life and love with others. Jesus shows us how to serve others, and the
Spirit gives us the strength and the courage to continue to do so. This is our
faith. This is our hope. This is how we are meant to live as the image of God’s
Divine Charity and Love.
Thus, writes Underhill, the importance of spending time in
contemplation and prayer with the source of Divine Charity each day. We need to
go within ourselves – our true selves as revealed by our God; our Love,
Liberating and Life-giving God! It is like stained-glass windows, she writes.
Viewed from outside, they remain dark, dirty, revealing no image to be seen. It
is not until we go within a church that their beauty, their stories, their
truths are revealed. She continues, “We
leave the outer world and enter the inner world; and at once we are surrounded by
a radiance, a beauty that lies beyond the fringe of speech itself! The
universal Light of God in which we live and move, and yet in reality always
escapes us, pours through those windows; bathes us in an inconceivable color
and splendor, and shows us things of which we have never dreamed before.” [ii]
Like the universe, like the Earth, we are made new every day!
Like all of creation which continues to unfold, we too are still
unsettled, still evolving, still changing, so that the deeper we go within our
life with the Triune God, we are changed more and more into a people, a
community, a church of Divine Charity that is open to and welcomes all people
with no exception. Each time we recite the Creed, it becomes more and more a
building block, the cornerstone of our very being, reminding us not only who we
are, but whose we are, and what we are: reflections of the true light of God’s
Divine self-giving Charity.
Back in 1964 I signed that paper with the Nicene Creed,
grudgingly, and got my Bible. And I believe that I have been changed by doing
so – or more precisely, changed by that which lives within it and behind it and
beyond it. Together, we will continue to be changed into a people of Faith,
Hope and Charity. Abide these three, writes St. Paul; but the greatest of these
is Charity.
No comments:
Post a Comment