At Mass today Father Dan, as part of his homily referred to the “three personalities” of God in the Trinity, which sparked me to wonder if the concept of the Tridentine God is merely a metaphor to describe and attempt to capture the essence of the inscrutable nature of this life force we call “God.”
The personification of this life force or creator has always troubled me as being an infantile attempt to conceptualize something that most clearly is beyond understanding, categorization or conceptualization.
A metaphoric Trinity as an expression of this life force in poetry rather than as a concrete expression of faith makes much more sense to me. The three personalities of this life force, Saint Patrick and his shamrock analogy notwithstanding, is in a poetic sense certainly less obtuse and confusing than a literal concept of Siamese triplets joined at the hip and yet being three distinct individuals.
The Trinity concept flows much easier in an intellectual sense as a metaphor for the aspects of this life force as it affects and interacts with each of us.
The concept of “father” for many of us induces parental feelings of structure, security, strength and at the same time love.
The image of “son” evokes the relationship each of us who come from a father have and the elements of that relationship: images of love, structure, protection, of someone who is always there for us. This Jesus fellow, referred to as the “Son of God” models the relationship we have with this life force of which he is apparently a part. We literally turn to our biological fathers for love , support, comfort and strength as part of our human development as we progress through life. Even after their deaths our human fathers leave the gift of who we are, who we have become and who we are continuing to become in major part as a result of their tutelage, support and example.
In like manner we look to this “Father” aspect of the life force we call “God” in much the way we look to our natural fathers, though more in a spiritual way to help us drill down within ourselves to center on the third poetic personality of our god, the life force or spirit within each of us which is both unique to us and in common with all beings in creation, sentient and otherwise.
Faith as poetry; “God” as metaphor, and our lives as the realization of both of those make more sense to me than a severe, dogmatic and literal explanation of beliefs and events that far transcend our human abilities to understand. We can experience the beauty, joy, pain and suffering in our lives and accept in graciousness that which we cannot understand. To do otherwise, I suspect, would merely be an exercise in self-delusion, one that would be ultimately unsatisfactory frustrating and unfulfilling.
However we individually conceive our god, we must live and experience that life force within us, accepting the fact that we can never define it, capture it, corral it or otherwise box it in.
Our faith must be one of poetry grounded in metaphor, a faith of participation in life rather than one of fact, fear and an indecipherable concrete god knowable only in death.