In one sense, of course, we can never understand God, and so can never understand God as Trinity; but that doesn’t mean that we cannot understand how we experience God, and in doing so get a tiny glimpse into what God as Trinity means. You can hear and see me give this Homily on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ml8vjxJGeIo
So for me, there are three ways in which we experience God, in which we meet God. First, we experience God as the power, the life-force, underlying the Universe. This is the God Jesus taught us to call “Father” : God the Father beyond us. Second, we meet God as the man Jesus who comes to us in love and dies for us. We call him God the Son: God the Son alongside us. Third we meet God within us, a power that inspires and encourages and supports us. We call this power God the Holy Spirit: God the Holy Spirit within us. There it is. The one God met in three different and distinct ways, but not three different gods, but simply one God met in these various ways. As St Paul says in our 2nd Reading (Rom 5:1-5) “We are .. at peace with God…. by faith and through Jesus …. because the love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been given us.”
Now having got that out of the way so to speak, I would like us to concentrate on an aspect of God that is revealed in our 1st Reading from Proverbs, (8:22-31) especially on that final phrase where God is described as “At play everywhere in his world.” It’s an interesting translation of a Hebrew word that is often translated as “rejoicing”; but by using the phrase “at play”, we catch the idea that not only is God’s creative activity in the world a joyful thing, but something even more fascinating because it has pattern and purpose. We sense this joyfulness particularly at this season of the year here in the UK, as we see nature going into a riotous proliferation of leaf and flower and baby birds fluttering and twittering everywhere we look. But speaking of God “at play” conjures up something rather more than this. Think of children at play, utterly absorbed in whatever they are doing. If you ask them what they’re doing, they often come up with strange answers don’t they? They may be talking to an imaginary friend or deep in some imaginary world. Yet their play has its own inner logic, even if we cannot understand it.
We adults also play, and often our play is equally mysterious looked at from outside. Those of you who like me do not understand cricket will know what I mean. They know what they are doing. There is a complicated pattern of behaviour that they are following, even if we do not understand what it is. It is the same with football as I was reminded when I visited the Charterhouse in London a couple of weeks ago. In the 19th Century each of a number of famous schools had their own rules for playing football, but they needed common rules if they wanted to play one another; so in 1863 they met to create the rules that they would all follow in future, and thus they became the FA. Yes, whatever game we play, be it Football or Chess, Bridge or Scrabble, play only makes sense and is fun if it has a set of laws that we all follow.
The other day I was in touch with a friend who is an Astro-Physicist and also a good Catholic, to check whether the laws of nature that scientists have discovered in the last 300 years, from Newton through Einstein to Hubble and Le Maitre, applied in Black Holes. He explained to me that the laws there are clearly different and not yet fully understood, but there are still laws, some of which they are trying to understand using the Large Hadron Collider. Yes, the Universe that God is rejoicing to create has a wonderful order, what we call the Laws of Nature. If it didn’t, then science and engineering wouldn’t work, so those who think science and religion contradict one another couldn’t be more wrong.
But there is yet another way of thinking about God at play, and that is to think of God as a great musician. I am a great devotee of the young cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason and when I watch him play he is so absorbed in his music that the sound floats out from him almost effortlessly, drawing me into it in a way that is quite beyond words. He seems to be creating sound spontaneously, and yet we know that what he is creating from inside his head has actually been set down somewhere by a composer following the laws of music. If Sheku were to deviate even a tiny bit from one right sound followed by another right sound all we would hear was something horribly out of tune, but he doesn’t; and when he stops playing, indeed when any great music stops playing, it continues to sing along somewhere in my head.
These images of God at play can give us at least a glimpse of God the Father, the God described in our Opening Prayer as a “Wondrous mystery”. Yes, God the Father has revealed himself to us, both in Jesus - a human being like us - and in the Holy Spirit, when at times we experience a power working within us as love or courage when faced with some challenge in our lives. But we can never know God the Father as he is, for this power is a power that is outside the Universe, that underlies the Universe, and is thus quite beyond even our wildest imagination. But what we can do is recognise the wonder of creation, and at least sense that there is a power and order underlying it.
But remember, Jesus tells us that we cannot know him nor God the Father through our own human efforts, we can only know God in any of these three ways, if we allow God to reveal himself to us. Or to put it another way, we can look at the beauty of the natural world, or at the man Jesus, or at experiences in our own lives and just see them as part of our human experience and nothing else; or if we are open to God, then God may reveal himself as “at play” in and through all this beauty, but God reveals himself in his way not in ours.
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