Vicar's News - 15 June 2025

Fr Ian
12 minutes ago
2 min read

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TRINITY SUNDAY

In my first placement as a student minister I was taught that, on Trinity Sunday, I should always get a guest to preach because explaining the Trinity is impossible, in human words.

There is something reassuring about an awareness of God that defies easy explanation.

If human beings were to invent a ‘god’ they would design one that makes sense to them. They would manufacture one that does as he’s told, behaves predictably, and could be comprehended by other human beings. They would not come up with ‘Trinity’ as:

We believe that God has self-revealed as three Persons: One God.

While Father, Son and Holy Spirit are the traditional words we use to describe the Persons of the Trinity, being our mere human words, even they do not adequately express the reality that is God. We will spend eternity coming to understand the mystery that is God.

Over the centuries there have been various attempts to express the Trinity, seeking for ways to describe how something can be one thing and three things at the same time. All of those symbols (e.g. the shamrock) offer some insight but invariably fall short. One approach might be to think of two or more musical notes being played together to form a dyad or a chord. Each note is distinct, but together they form one sound.

Of course, even this insight falls short of the reality that is the Trinity. All it seeks to do is to highlight the thought that it is not as nonsensical as some might imagine to say that something can be one thing and several things at the same time.