Trinity Sunday

Trinity Sunday always has a special place in my devotion as it is the anniversary of my Confirmation. I was confirmed by +Simon Barrington-Ward, then bishop of Coventry. A very English bishop with a charismatic twist, he would give each confirmand a word of knowledge as he laid hands on them. It could well be renamed 'How to avoid heresy Sunday' because God-talk and the Trinity is just a little fraught. I remember this well known but still useful story about Augustine of Hippo: "The story is told of St Augustine of Hippo, a great philosopher and theologian who wanted so much to understand the doctrine of the Trinity and to be able to explain it logically. One day as he was walking along the sea shore and reflecting on this, he suddenly saw a little child all alone on the shore. The child made a hole in the sand, ran to the sea with a little cup, filled her cup, came and poured it into the hole she had made in the sand. Back and forth she went to the sea, filled her cup and came and poured it into the hole. Augustine went up to her and said, "Little child, what are doing?" and she replied, "I am trying to empty the sea into this hole." "How do you think," Augustine asked her, "that you can empty this immense sea into this tiny hole and with this tiny cup?" To which she replied, " And you, how do you suppose that with this your small head you can comprehend the immensity of God?" With that the child disappeared." Indeed. The Anglican theologian, Austen Farrer has this to say: "If God might be comprehended, he would not be God. An over-confident dogmatism is as fatal to theistic belief as scepticism itself; it pretends to prove and to define, only to discover that what it has defined and proved is not its Lord and God. You can no more catch God’s infinity in a net of words than...you can fish out the sea the glories of the dying day." Suffice to say it is good to stick with the tried and tested, the so-called Athanasian Creed, not really a creed as such and certainly not by the hand of Athanasius but still the gold standard as a balanced explanation of the Trinity. "And the catholic faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; Neither confounding the Persons; nor dividing the Essence." Amen.