The Great Trinitarian Sadness
Sadness is a wall between two gardens.
– Kahlil Gibran
How can a doctrine, like the Trinity, be connected to an emotion? Does the Trinity have feelings? If God is Love, then why not? If the Trinity is a doctrine of relationship, then of course it does. In the midst of the great sadness in our world today, what wall might we help all of us climb over in preaching the Trinity this Sunday?
When I lived in Durham, NC my therapist was also a nun. I know, it was a win-win. I could effortlessly talk about a variety of theological and church related topics and she got it, right quick. I do not remember what prompted it but at one session she told me to read The Shack. A book I had heard about but had no interest in because everything I read about it maligned its lack of scholarship, its simplistic storytelling, its shock-value use of tragedy to begin a conversation with God.
“Actually, Arianne,” I remember her saying, “Don’t read the book. Listen to the audio version. I just think it will enable you to really hear what the author is sharing.”
Sometime later that month, driving along Route 147, I had to pull my car over. I was listening to the book and realized that I couldn’t see through all my tears. I needed to stop and just listen.
The book has sold over 20 million copies since it was published in 2007, and was made into a movie staring Octavia Spencer as God herself (she was great, I thought the movie was ok) so I’m not going to take up time with the plot line. The opening tragedy, which is the catalyst for the angry, God-seeking protagonist Mack, is not what moved me to tears.
The story, as all good stories do, helped me connect with the relational reality of life in God. The story, as all good stories do, made me think of my own. It jolted awake that other operating system that theological and intellectual scholarship rarely illuminates. The “eyes of the heart” as Cynthia Bourgeault and St. Paul (Eph 1:18) pray for us to use and cultivate.
The value of the theology of the Trinity started making sense. Not as a doctrine but as the nature of God. A pattern of being. A way that was already in my life through all the relationships I had and wanted, all the relationships I brought to God for healing.
An opening chapter is titled, “The Great Sadness.” There is a great sadness in our world right now. There is a great sadness in our country and in our congregations. There is violence and righteous anger because of this grief. There is the lament of how long, O Lord, how long?
Mack, the protagonist, must go to his place of deepest pain to encounter God. And when he does it is not one but three. Three people he can relate to, argue with, laugh with, cry with, to wrestle in the ways all of us do with wanting so very much to make sense of the experiences of our lives that simply do not.
Sadness, grief, suffering when it is not drowning us, draws us out of ourselves. Richard Rohr says there are two primary paths to God – great love and great suffering. That is what leads us to see there is no separation, that “the inescapable network of mutuality” MLK, Jr. described is always there. The relational reality of Trinity is constant. We just go in and out of seeing it. In and out of participating and celebrating the possibilities that divine flow, that darn perichoresis, always brings.
In the chapter, Mack is described as wanting to separate from God because of his sadness, trying “to embrace a stoic, unfeeling faith.” (p. 64) He was, “sick of God and God’s religion, sick of all the little religious social clubs that didn’t seem to make any real difference or affect any real changes…he wanted more” (66).
We all want more right now. We want more of ourselves. We want more of our leaders. We want our churches to be more than religious social clubs. We all want our world to change – to become more. To become the world God dreams and tells us is possible.
The relational reality of God is a pattern for us right now. The relational disparity of our world goes against this reality. There is no disparity in one in three and three in one. There is no disparity in “I am because we are.” There is great sadness within the nature of God who weeps with us in our lament.
So, then, what to say, what to preach? The Shack was one of many affirming encounters for me that speaking from the heart is what speaks to people’s hearts. Over 20 million people took in this book because they wanted affirmation of something we already know. God is relating to us all the time and vice versa. God is in everything, everyone all the time even though we forget. Even though, again and again, we refuse to honor that truth.
In your world and in your heart, there is your own great love and great sadness. There is at least one story you can preach that shares the relational reality of the Trinity and why that matters in your life with God, and in the life of your community, and in the life of our world, right now. Preach that. We need to hear it. We need people to help us see past the wall, give us courage to climb over that wall, support each other in breaking down the walls, in sharing a glimpse of the garden.
