The Sauntering Pilgrim

“God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good” (Gen. 1:31a).

Today is Trinity Sunday. It celebrates an idea Jesus never taught; that wasn’t mentioned in scripture until fifty years or more after his resurrection; that took another 300 years of debate and coalition building to become doctrine; that wasn’t observed as a special day until the tenth century, and that 400 years after that, in the fourteenth century, was finally set as the first Sunday after Pentecost. Despite all those centuries of development, I believe, the Holy Trinity is an idea that has never been really understood.

We can talk about the three persons of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And we can recall that the word “person” is from the Greek word persona, referring to the mask an actor wore to identify the character being played in a drama. One actor might play more than one role and would change masks, or persona, so as not to confuse the audience. Same actor, different role, different persona. It’s a short step to: same God, different role, different person. As the hymn goes, “God in three persons, blessed Trinity!” And already we’re in trouble.

British writer Aldous Huxley put his finger on our weakness. “It is man’s intelligence,” he wrote, “that makes him so often behave more stupidly than the beasts. Man is impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic.” When I even think about explaining God as Trinity, I imagine God dressing me down like God dressed Job down. “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?” God would say to me; “Gird up your loins like a man [and] I will question you” (Job 38:2-3)! And I can hear Huxley chortling in the background.

When I even think of speculating like a lunatic on matters as profound as the nature of God (like explaining the Holy Trinity, for example), I remember something Thomas Merton wrote: “Nothing has ever been said about God that hasn’t already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.” Or I imagine Duke Senior, in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, retreating to the countryside to “hear the voices of the trees, read books in the running brooks, hear sermons in the stones, and find the good in everything” (act 2, scene 1, trans.).

God’s first scripture was not written in a book, it was written in nature. “The heavens are telling the glory of God,” the psalmist wrote; “and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard; yet their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world” (Ps. 19:1-4a).

God, I believe, doesn’t want our explanations and theories and doctrines; God wants our ears, our hearts, the blood that courses through our veins, our whole selves. God wants us to hear the “music of the spheres” that sings through all the earth and the planets and the cosmos beyond. God wants us to awaken to the music that, as Walt Whitman wrote, “is not the violins and the cornets, it is not the oboe nor the beating drums, nor the score of the baritone singer singing his sweet romanza, nor that of the men’s chorus, nor that of the women’s chorus. / It is nearer and farther than they” (Leaves of Grass).

Maybe the music of the spheres was what Thoreau heard when he wrote in his journal that “A slight sound at evening lifts me up by the ears, and makes life seem inexpressibly sweet and grand. It may be in Uranus, or it may be in the shutter.” Maybe I’ve heard that music but didn’t recognize it, believing it to be the shutter, or the peepers or crickets, or a whispered resonance that touched my heart from – from what or from where? Did I hear it, and did I respond? Have you heard it? Have you responded? Have you allowed yourself to be lifted up by the ears?

A man of deep wisdom told me, we don’t sing because we’re happy, we sing because we’re human. And because we’re human we carry within us the song of life, a song that must be expressed, that will be expressed through us. It’s the music of the spheres that plays us like the wind plays a flute. Our work in life is to open up and be played. Whether yours is nurturing children, making music, singing in a choir, doing theater, gardening, writing, teaching, running a business, painting, constructing houses, sharing the healing arts, or anything else under the sun, just open up and be played.

God wants your music, I’m certain, more than any theory or doctrine. “Sing,” the Carpenters told us, “sing a song / Make it simple to last your whole life long / Don’t worry that it’s not good enough / For anyone else to hear / Just sing, sing a song.” ▪