There is a scene in The Color Purple where Shug and Celie are talking. Celie complains, “The God I been praying and writing to is a man. And act like all the other mens I know. Trifling, forgetful and lowdown. Shug say, Miss Celie. You better hush. God might hear you.Let him her me, I say. If he ever listened to poor colored women the world would be a different place, I can tell you. All my life I never care what people thought bout nothing I did, I say. But deep in my heart I care about God. What he going to think. And come to find out, he don’t think. Just sit up there glorying in being deef, I reckon. But it ain’t easy, trying to do without God. Even if you know he ain’t there, trying to do without him is a strain.
Here’s the thing, say Shug. The thing I believe. God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And sometimes it just manifest itself even if you not looking, or don’t know what you looking for. Trouble do it for most folks, I think.
Shug say, My first step from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people. But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed.
Well, us talk and talk bout God, but I’m still adrift. Trying to chase that old white man out my head. I been so busy thinking bout him I never truly notice nothing God make. Not a blade of corn (how God do that?) not the color purple in a field (where it come from?) not the little wildflowers. Nothing. Now that my eyes opening I feels like a fool. Next to any little scrub of bush in my yard, all the world’s evil sort of shrink.”
It might seem odd to begin a reflection on the Mystery of the Trinity, the most profound of all the mysteries, with a conversation of two ordinary people talking about God. In another sense it is exactly the correct starting point. One of the royal highways to the truths of faith comes through reflection on our experiences. Celie came to realize that her image of God, her perception of what God was like was misplaced. Trying to find God above it all, as an old white man with a long beard sitting on a throne, simply did not work. She had to chase that image out of her head in order to have a genuine encounter with God. As she encountered God in the beauty of creation her image of God changed.
That is not all that different from how the experience of those first believers led them to understand the one God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The followers of Jesus learned from him that God was the one who loved us first, last and always. Jesus used the image of God as Father as a way of expressing the kind of love that God showers upon us, a love that comes simply because we are part of the divine family. And in meeting Jesus, particularly in his death and resurrection, Peter, Andrew, Mary Magdalene and all the rest came to recognize in him God-with-us, Emmanuel. The insight that Jesus was unbreakably connected with God who loves us a Father led to Jesus becoming known as the Son. After the Ascension, when the Jesus they had walked the dusty roads with was gone, his followers still experienced his presence. They felt he was still with them, caring for them and guiding them, as they lived out the faith in their everyday lives. That experience they named the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus. So the image of the one God they inherited as part of their tradition changed. The one God was a Father who loved them, a Son who was with them and a Spirit who sustained them. Their experience of God changed their image of God.
The first believers understood that we do not meet God by seeking someone who is above it all, who sits on a lofty throne in heaven. Rather we meet God as one who acts, who comes to meet us, who seeks us out in love. As the first believers became the Church they realized that from all eternity the very being of God is love, who reveals that love to us in Jesus and shares that love with us in the Spirit. They applied the word Trinity to this understanding of God as a way of holding onto the one God while at the same time expressing confidence in the love God had for us in the past, has with us in the present and will shower upon us in the future. God can’t be God by staying in splendid isolation in heaven but only in a relationship of love.
Which brings us to today. Among the last words of Jesus to his disciples according to St. Matthew was the admonition to teach “to observe all that I have commanded you.” What Jesus commanded us is not simply to observe the ten commandments – although that is certainly a good thing to do. What Jesus commanded us to observe is not merely that we love one another – although that is an even better thing to do. No, the one specific thing Jesus mentions during this scene that we are to observe is that “I am with you always, until the end of the age.” This Sunday promotes devotion to the Trinity that is not limited to a profession in our creeds and memorized answers from the catechism. Rather, genuine devotion comes when we look at our own experience and find that Jesus is with us and since he is with us God is with us. He is with us in prayer and the Eucharist, certainly. But he is also with us in every experience of love since God is love. Our homework this week is to be like Celie and Shug and find in our experiences a truer encounter with God. On Trinity Sunday, God is constantly breaking into our lives if we have the eyes to see.
