Favorite Words

I am relentlessly, hopelessly trinitarian.

It's a little bit too easy to pigeonhole varying strands or denominations in terms of the person of the Trinity that they (over)emphasize: evangelicals cling to Jesus; Pentecostals get swept up in the Holy Spirit; Catholics, perhaps, place primacy on God the Father as the all-perfect being.

No doubt faithful members of any of those groups would argue against my brutal oversimplification, and I would hardly blame them.  But I wonder, occasionally, if one of the gifts I have in being in The Episcopal Church (a so-called "mainline" American denomination) is to point always to the Trinity.

I love the Episcopal / Anglican liturgy.  I love starting off the service in the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  I love the Collect for Purity:
Almighty God, to whom all hearts are open, all desires known; cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your holy name, through Christ our Lord.  Amen.

I love saying the creed every week.  I even have my particular favorite parts of the creed (light from light, will come again, spoken through the prophets), as well as phrases I find it easier to left unsaid (and the Son).  I love having a confession and absolution every week.  I love to receive eucharist every week.

I remarked to my supervisor a few weeks ago that I feel a glacial shift in my piety is nearing completion.  Growing up, I scarcely thought about the fact that we received communion maybe 3-4 times a year.  When Cyprian was born, I felt off having missed church.  It was weird, and I was so grateful to make it back to church the next Sunday.

But all that isn't even quite what I mean.  Studying the Trinity literally changed my life.  It changed the way I think about relationships with other people, about faith and doubt, about God.

When I get asked what my favorite word is, I usually say perichoresis.  It's a Greek word that means "interpenetration" or "intercommunion" or some such.  It means an ever living "dance" of the persons of the Godhead who know and are fully known by each other.  And not only fully known, but fully loved.

In Systematics class at Houghton, my professor asked the class a question once that struck like a bell in my soul and emptied my mind for the rest of lecture (I literally have no idea what happened the last 20 minutes of class): Can you imagine, do you really want someone to know you, completely, all the way, fully realizing every bit of you?  I was stunned.  I was pretty sure the answer was no, and yet...

Lately, my favorite word has maybe been sehnsucht.  A German word used by C.S. Lewis, sehnsucht I think is nicely phrased by two different song lyrics.  Andrew Peterson has a phrase in "The Voice of Jesus" that goes "And I want you to know / when the joy that you feel / leaves a terrible ache in your bones // It's the voice of Jesus / calling you back home."  The other is a song by Brook Frasier, and I believe it's quoting C.S. Lewis himself; at any rate, the song is called "The C.S. Lewis Song."  "If I discover in myself / desires / nothing in this world can satisfy / I can only conclude / that I, I was not made for here."

All this to say, I want to bear witness to the terrible longing I have to be one with God, to be made divine, to participate in the nature of God where I am known and fully known and fully loved by a God  I continue to learn to love.

Being vs. Presenting

My internship supervisor and I have spent the last three weeks talking about my difficulty being myself vs. presenting myself.  In some ways (and maybe I'll talk about the reasons for this later) I feel like I'm trying to perform, to present myself.  All questions of forcing something that should come organically, aside...

One way it came up (again) was as I finally figured out something about the question she asks me every week: "What's next?  What else do you want / need?  Where do you need to grow?"

They are really good, really important, necessary questions.  I'm glad she asks.  But I sat and started to realize that you can hear those questions in one of two ways.  The first way is to say that "you are a failure, there is something missing, you lack something, you're messed up somehow so how do you need to fix it now?"  The second is to hear "Yes, you are wonderful and beautiful but how are you still blossoming and becoming something even more beautiful?"

I was hearing the first set of questions.  It was grating on me to hear them every week.  I come back again to Mindset, making me think about how I've been trying to probe my identity over and over again and been really afraid of failure instead of taking each interaction as it is and using everything as a learning, growing experience.

Anyway, part of it is that I'm so cautious in social settings (in some ways!).  I try to figure out the spirit of a group before I let myself really show into it.  In seminary, issues of political correctness swirled around a few hot-button soapbox issues; I rarely, if ever, let my real feelings on those issues out into the open (if, indeed, I knew exactly what they were).  Similarly, when I was telling a friend in college I had gotten into Yale she was flabbergasted: "You got into Yale?!?!?!?!"  Maybe she was impressed, but it felt to me as though she clearly didn't believe that I was being honest, that I really had.

I'd be willing to bet that it surprises / surprised many people I was headed to seminary at all.  I don't know that, outside a few who pushed me towards it, people saw me / I acted like a person who was serious about going into ministry.  Other than playing roles in ministry settings, did I have the personality / habits of a minister?

I said to my supervisor that I keep the things that really excite me, my passions, under wraps most of the time.  If they don't happen to come up, I don't let them out.  If people don't ask me the right questions, I won't give my answers.  The grind of the daily keeps a lot of what I think and want to to and want to be from coming out into the open (probably I'm scared of being judged, dismissed, etc.).

Anyway, all that serves as context for what I want to say.  It starts with "I'm relentlessly, hopelessly Trinitarian..."