Letter from Amy: June 3, 2026

Sylwia Perczak (Polish, 1977–), “Boga nikt nigdy nie widział, Jednorodzony Bóg, który jest w łonie Ojca, o Nim pouczył” (Polish for "No one has ever seen God. It is the only Son, himself God, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known" from John 1:18), 2023.

Dear Incarnation,

I loved celebrating Trinity Sunday with you! And I had several rich conversations afterward about the trinitarian nature of God, which is a bottomless well of contemplation.

During my sermon, I chose to focus on how the church got to the doctrine of the Trinity. I didn’t actually say much about the doctrine itself (I let the Athanasian Creed do the heavy lifting there)! I took that approach this year because it grew out of my sermon on “doubting worshipers” from Matthew 28:17.

Trinitarian doctrine emerged from the wrestling of doubting worshipers, a response to the God who had revealed himself to them in love. And God’s self-revelation — in scripture, in history, in Jesus, in the midst of the church, in the interior life of the soul — is trinity-shaped. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit eternally live and move and have their being in a relationship of dynamic, self-giving, mutually indwelling love. All of the church’s worship is a grasping toward that Three-in-One reality.

For those interested in more, I’ve rounded up a few quotes, poems, art, even a video clip from across the church as further fuel for contemplation of this marvelous mystery. Enjoy!

First, Anglican writer C.S. Lewis is always wonderful for bringing clarity. In Mere Christianity, he writes why the Trinity matters:

“What does it all matter? It matters more than anything else in the world. The whole dance, or drama, or pattern of this three-personal life is to be played out in each one of us: or each one of us has got to enter that pattern, take his or her place in that dance. There is no other way to the happiness for which we were made . . .. If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire; if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them. They are not a sort of prize God hands out. They are a great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very center of reality. If you are close to it, the spray will wet you. If not, you will remain dry. Once a man is united to God, how could he not live for ever? But how is he united to God? How is it possible for us to be taken into the three-personal life? Remember what I said about begetting and making. In our natural state we are not sons of God, only statues. We do not have spiritual life, only biological life. The whole offer of Christianity is this: that we can, if we let God have his way, come to share in the life of Christ. We shall then be sharing a life which is begotten, not made, which has always existed and always will exist. Christ is the Son of God. If we share this kind of life we shall be sons of God. We shall love the Father as he does, receive the Father’s love as he does, and the Holy Ghost will arise in us and love out through us.”

Moving from clarity toward mystery, here’s a Trinity poem from the modern Anglican poet and priest Malcolm Guite:

In the Beginning, not in time or space,

But in the quick before both space and time,

In Life, in Love, in co-inherent Grace,

In three in one and one in three, in rhyme,

In music, in the whole creation story,

In His own image, His imagination,

The Triune Poet makes us for His glory,

And makes us each the other’s inspiration.

He calls us out of darkness, chaos, chance,

To improvise a music of our own,

To sing the chord that calls us to the dance,

Three notes resounding from a single tone,

To sing the End in whom we all begin;

Our God beyond, beside us and within.

Guite’s mention of music brings me to this short video by Jeremy Begbie, a musician and theologian at Duke Divinity. Here, he uses music to explain an aspect of the Trinity that theologians call “non-competitive union”; the idea that the three persons of the Trinity fully retain their individual personalities while also fully interpenetrating and indwelling one another. Their personality does not diminish the fullness of their unity, and their unity does not diminish the fullness of their personality. We have a fancy Greek word for this non-competitive mutual interpenetration: perichoresis, which literally means  something like “dance around”; you can see the root for choreography in there!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E021XK7tHlc

Moving toward the visual arts, I loved this post from Art & Theology a few years ago featuring a medieval illustrated manuscript with beautiful, provocative, weird-in-the-best-way images of Trinitarian perichoresis. The entire post is fascinating if you have lots of time, but you can also just scroll down to the bottom to see the images which are described as: “a playful, intimate approach to the triune God, . . . . something more like an eternal dance. . . . The divine persons are caught up in an everlasting game of hide-and-seek with humans.”

How cool are these?! I can’t choose a favorite, but I do particularly love the ones of the Father and Son touching feet behind an imploding sun, or high-fiving over the Holy Spirit while grasping its legs.

And finally, reaching all the way back to the early church, perhaps no one is more poetic in his contemplation of the Trinity than 4th century archbishop and theologian Gregory of Nazianzus. He writes:

“No sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the Splendor of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish Them than I am carried back to the One. When I think of any One of the Three I think of Him as the Whole, and my eyes are filled, and the greater part of what I am thinking of escapes me. I cannot grasp the greatness of That One so as to attribute a greater greatness to the Rest. When I contemplate the Three together, I see but one torch, and cannot divide or measure out the Undivided Light." (Orat. 40.41, On Holy Baptism)

Notice that this quote comes from a work on baptism. Because Jesus taught his followers to baptize in the Triune Name, all trinitarian theology first emerged as a contemplation on baptism. In fact, it has been said that all Christian doctrine can be seen as a meditation on the meaning of our baptism — more contemplation for another day!

As we see from these varied sources (and so many more from across church history), the goal of our trinitarian contemplation is not doctrinal precision, but worship: verbally, poetically, visually, musically, experientially responding to God with all that we are, reaching beyond the limits of human language and understanding. This is the worshiping-while-doubting space that I spoke about on Sunday.

Questions about the Trinity? Or want to pray or talk through something a little closer to home? Please reach out; I love to hear from you.

With love,

Amy