The Holy Trinity
Once there was a teacher, she was twenty five years old and came from a humble family background. She had successfully completed her studies and done very well but lived in constant fear of making a mistake and thus proving herself unworthy of her new found status. She started to pine away from lack of sleep and attempts at medication. Her doctor was at a loss as to how best to help her and so he sent her to see Carl Jung in the hope that the new fangled practice of psychoanalysis might help. Jung only saw her for an hour but during that time quickly realised that she was suffering from an unbearable state of spasmodic tension and that what she needed was to learn how to relax. He told her that he found sailing on the lake near where he lived enabled him to relax by letting himself go with the wind. However he quickly realised that although she got the idea intellectually it didn’t in fact resonate with her at the kind of emotional level required to bring her relief. I will let Jung’s own words convey what happened next: “Reason had no effect. Then, as I talked of sailing and of the wind, I heard the voice of my mother singing a lullaby to my little sister as she used to do when I was eight or nine: a story of a little girl in a little boat, on the Rhine, with little fishes. And I began, almost without doing it on purpose, to hum what I was telling her about the wind, the waves, the sailing, and relaxation, to the tune of the little lullaby. I hummed these sensations, and I could see that she was “enchanted”. After an hour she left and Jung never saw her again. He did however, years later, hear about her from her doctor who told Jung that she had returned to him cured. This got Jung thinking about how the cure had been affected and he concluded with the following: “Enchantment like this is the oldest form of medicine. But it all happened outside of my reason: it was not until later that I thought about it rationally and tried to arrive at the laws behind it. She was cured by the grace of God.”
Jung told this story on one occasion to an interviewer who then asked him how he could possibly talk about the grace of God. Jung replied by talking about “images of God” and illustrated what he meant by telling another anecdote from his wide experience, this time of foreign travel. He noticed one particular tribe in Africa greeted the first rays of the sun by spitting on their hands and turning them towards it. Jung concluded that this gesture meant that they were offering their souls to God. He asked the tribesmen if the sun was their god, at this suggestion they promptly fell about laughing and intimated that he was a somewhat imbecilic white man with no real understanding. Jung then noted that they greeted the moon in the same way and he came to realise that what they were doing had to do with the experience of the moment when darkness changes into light. The grace of God is not an intellectual understanding but is an experience of something that is totally beyond reason, it is much bigger than our minds can ever conceive. The grace of God does not impart information about God or define how we are to think about him, for God is beyond our understanding and we do not have the capacity to know God in that sense, the grace of God changes us.
Now why tell you all these tales of my mentor Jung on this particular Sunday, what possible purpose does it serve? Well the reason quite simply is that today we are celebrating the Festival of the Holy Trinity and for a lot of people, including Jung’s father who was a clergyman, the idea of the Trinity is an incomprehensible doctrine best not thought about lest one ends up with a bad headache. The Trinity is about an experience of God rather than a confusing, and apparently contradictory, series of ideas about Him. To dismiss talk of the Trinity as being too difficult rather misses the point but at the risk of giving you all a migraine just one little bit of philosophy prior to going on to talk about what the Bible says might just help. Immanuel Kant put forward the idea that we do not really know things in their true nature or essence rather what we know is our perception of them or put another way our experience of them. That said we can go on to claim that the starting point of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is not an attempt to define God as such, for that is impossible, it is rather a reflection on an encounter with God. The encounter comes first the theologising comes second. The Bible does not formally define God as being Trinitarian rather it concerns itself with “Salvation History” and it is from this experience the Christian images of God arise. In the Bible Christ is seen and proclaimed as the “Incarnate Son of God” He speaks of God as his “Father”; He dies and rises from the dead and then sends the “Holy Spirit” upon the first Apostles. Hence the Christian experience of God can be summed up by saying “God over us, God with us, God in us”. I think if I were writing the post communion prayer for today which contains the statement “You have revealed yourself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit”, I would have phrased it somewhat differently: perhaps, “we perceive you as Father, Son and Holy Spirit”. I do however very much like sentiment of a later part of the prayer, “that we may know you in all your ways”. For me that catches it perfectly, for this knowing is not merely intellectual, it goes much deeper than head knowledge, it is in fact more like what Jung’s patient experienced when he hummed that lullaby.
Perhaps the fact that we as Christians perceive God as one God in Three Persons actually says more about us and what we need than it does about God. The pre Christian images of the gods show them as a rather rum lot who are at each other’s throats, constantly jostling for position and who use human beings for their own selfish ends; not really very nice entities. By contrast the Hebrew tradition spoke of one God but this God was a remote figure to most people and often an angry and guilt inducing reality who was Himself quite capable of playing fast and loose with human beings, take the example of Job. Neither of these approaches to the divine gives a particularly harmonious picture. As a very real contrast to this we have the Christian image of God which arises out of Salvation History where Father Son and Holy Spirit form one divine unity of three persons interacting in perfect harmony. I would suggest that the old pagan gods and the God of the Old Testament aptly illustrate something quite profound about human experience for we ourselves are so very often, on the one hand torn asunder by warring inner drives and emotions, whilst on the other hand tortured by a sense that we are less than we should be. We thus fall prey to untamed primeval urges and an overactive superego or conscience. No wonder St Paul having come to an honest and realistic appraisal of his own experience of himself could cry out, “oh, wretched man that I am who will deliver me from this body of death?” I would want to contend that as human beings we long for a sense of relatedness which will deliver us from these inner conflicts, we desire an inner tranquillity and unity not unlike that of the Christian vision of the God who is both one and three: diversity in unity rather than warring factions in disharmony. St Paul of course was able to answer his own question by saying with utter relief, “thanks be to God through Jesus Christ”. He knew that through God’s saving acts in history he was delivered.
How shall we conclude? Well we are here today not to celebrate a complex theological idea so much as to embrace with faith what God the Father has done for us in and through God the Son made real to us by God the Holy Spirit. St Aquinas was quite right when he described theology as “faith seeking understanding”. It was Jung listening to his inner voice telling him to hum a lullaby which released the young teacher, only afterwards did he think through how this worked and realised that it was in fact the grace of God at work. The African tribesmen no more thought that they worshipped a heat source in the sky than we should think the Nicene Creed has finally defined the essence of God. What we need this morning is to listen to the inner voice of the Holy Spirit as He reveals through Word and Sacrament the reality of God’s love manifest in His Son Jesus Christ – the rest will follow.
