Dear Friends,
I love being on Church Twitter and other niche corners of the internet each year as Trinity Sunday comes around. It’s notoriously entertaining as, primarily priests, talk about their attempts to write a sermon without committing heresy. Of course, no one is actually concerned that failure will doom their souls or any such thing, but really, talking about the Trinity can feel a lot like solving a riddle.
And don’t get me started on the filioque controversy. I love this stuff, but it can get a little silly.
As I am known to say, You Can’t Break Church. (At the very least, it’s *very* hard.)
So, if clergy are tying themselves in knots trying to preach on the Trinity to adults, what are we doing with children? Personally, I’m increasingly inclined just to be quiet about it and see what they can help us to discover.
Trinity Moments
In Godly Play, we make a number of motions towards the Trinity with varying degrees of complexity. In the Baptism story, for example, we lay out three white circles in the manner of a Trefoil, noting that “We baptize people in the name of the Father [roll out first circle], the Son [second], and the Holy Spirit [third].” We do not name this as the Trinity, but because we are thinking in terms of language systems and relationships, it appears.
For older children who have a more substantial grasp of these pieces, Godly Play’s Trinity Synthesis story names these parts more directly, though till obliquely in many ways, using Creation, Faces of Easter, and Paul’s Discovery to hold space for each person of the Trinity. That story is complicated and long – I think it took me nearly 45 minutes to tell to adults (who don’t interrupt the process) – but it is an invitation into the great works and relationships between the Persons of the Trinity in this world.
Did God Die?
Several months ago, as I worked with some of the older children in our Church school program, we were talking, gauging what they had learned over the years and what big questions they found compelling. And as we spoke, one child popped up and asked, “Did God die?”
Good question!
Did God, who is characterized as immortal, die?
Can we call Jesus’s death, which ultimately led to resurrection and ascension, death in any way that we understand it?
And what about the other Persons? They didn’t die. As hard as it is to understand Death, it’s even harder to imagine what the Father or the Spirit dying would even mean. It is all beyond our ken.
And that’s okay. Not knowing is an invitation to wonder.
I invite you into this prayer for big questions (especially those of you who are living alongside a child who is currently in the why phase of life. If you are living in that moment when the questions seem to never end, it can be so much harder to stay open to that curiosity, to not wallow in frustration because they never stop. But what if we ask questions in return?
I wonder what we might discover!
On Not Knowing
I love facts. In fact, I exasperated my mother to no end with my constant regurgitation of facts as a child, and even now, I am a sinkhole of information and random skills. (Those who know me well know that I am constantly pulling something unexpected from my proverbial bag of tricks.) But as much as I covet knowledge for its own sake, not knowing has a place. Not knowing can be a gift. And admitting to children that we don’t know is not a failing. It’s an invitation to explore together or to let them lead with curiosity.
If you tacked up four pieces of paper in your parish hall or entryway - God/Father/Son/Holy Spirit – and invited a casual brain storm, a free association around these separate yet unified Persons by those of all ages, what would you find? What happens when we as communities turn towards the original community? I wonder!
I leave you with this invocation and invitation by Sandra McCracken.
Let go of the heresy anxiety and even the jokes. What if we aren’t meant to know, but to trust, to be caught by the Trinity that surrounds us all of our days? What a blessing to let the Creeds say what they will, to reflect on them when they call us, but not worry about imposing them on our experiences, tying ourselves up in some Trinity Knot.
Peace,
Bird