The Holy Trinity
Everything is related. Everything is connected. There is nothing that happens in the world, nothing at all, which does not have an impact on something else, or someone else. In scientific terms this is known as the “Butterfly Effect”. This is the idea that even something as insignificant as a butterfly flapping its wings can cause a chain reaction, a series of events, which ends up having a much greater effect: the soccer ball, which gets kicked on to the road, causing the speeding car to slow down, means that same car narrowly misses a bicycle on the round-a-bout up ahead, instead of ploughing straight into it.
Christians have known for two thousand years that everything is connected. It’s really easy in our Western society to think that all that matters is the individual, and that the wider connection of all things, the wider relationship of all things, is unimportant by comparison.
Individuals do matter, by the way. I love all of my children as the unique characters that they are. They are all individuals and I think they’re all pretty special. But they are also part of a family and part of a community. They don’t exist by themselves – they’re part of a wider network of people.
They are also part of the planet. Until we have developed space travel enough to be able to travel to distant stars and find another habitable planet, we human beings are absolutely bound up with the health of the earth. So, you can see the point I’m making, we human beings are individuals, and exist in our own right, but we’re also part of a much larger network of people, and of the earth itself. We don’t exist alone.
One way we Christians try and understand God is to talk about God, the Holy Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Understanding God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit means believing that life is not about individuals, in the main, it is in fact about relationships. Everything we do is about relationships in one way or another. There is nothing we do that doesn’t have an impact on someone else or something else – everything is related.
The example of this comes from the Trinity. The Father relates to the Son, the Son to the Spirit, and so on. No one person of the Trinity stands alone or exists in isolation, they continually relate to one another. But they relate equally; no one person of the Trinity is less important or subordinate to the other. There is no hierarchy of importance within the Trinity. All three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, are equally important.
The three persons of the Trinity do have different roles: different “areas of expertise” would be the current terminology! So God the Father is the Creator, who sustains the world, who forgives sins. God the Son is Jesus: the historical man, who reconciled us to God through his death and resurrection, and who now as the ascended Christ continually draws human beings and indeed all of creation back to God. God the Holy Spirit, dwells within us, closer than breathing, the “divine spark” within us, who both insures us and calms us down when we need it.
So, the persons of the Trinity are distinct and they have different roles, but no one person is more important than the other. The relationship between the persons of the Trinity is totally equal. The Trinity is like this finger spinner: all parts must move together, so closely, so perfectly, in such a balanced way that they appear to be one.
We’re all in this together. We all a part of God’s creation, and we all need to work together, so that all our lives will be better. Everything we do is part of an intricate web of connections. We do nothing in isolation. This approach will only serve to strengthen our lives as a community, both as a Church community and a wider community. If we allow the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit to guide our whole lives, then all of our lives will be enriched. May God the Holy Trinity be our guide in everything we do.
The Reverend Dr Theo McCall
School Chaplain
