Three, two, one.
One of the joys of being a lay preacher is the experience of sitting down to write an address, getting a thousand or so words through it and then realising it's not fit for purpose. Like Art Lester, who these days is ministering to our Croydon congregation, I'm really good at writing stuff that is more suited the academic podium than the pulpit. The first rule of a good address is: keep it simple – and since I find it so hard to follow, it's perhaps as well that there aren't really other rules that apply to it.
As Unitarians, we like to think of ourselves as heretics – we began as a Christian heresy, and our deep conviction that as soon as a religious tradition establishes an orthodoxy it loses contact with the Divine and stops walking its talk is both our brightest blessing and our collective Shadow – for it means that we have to re-invent ourselves in each generation, and there are plenty of signs that that effort is becoming too much for us. But if there is any point to our preaching tradition it is surely from the pulpit first and foremost that this re-invention must come, and if a lay preacher believes that she or he has anything to say in the matter, it is from the pulpit that it should be said.
And to-day I want to commend to you the one heresy that, as Unitarians, we of the free and enquiring religion, we of the open minds and hearts – the one heresy that we will not embrace, the one object of Unitarian anathema – I want to suggest to you that you might, after all, do well to be Trinitarians.
For if there is one thing that Christians don't know, it's their own trinitarian doctrine, and what it symbolises. Try asking a Christian how they know when to pray to the Father, when to the Son and when to the Holy Spirit – they'll get very uncomfortable and civility may lead you to want to change the subject…
As he was turning from boyhood to manhood, Carl Jung famously asked his father, a Calvinist minister, to explain the Trinity to him. The father shook his head and sadly confessed that he didn't understand it, never had understood it. It's quite possible to see the whole of Jung's career as a search for the meaning of the Trinity, as an attempt to restore his father to wholeness, if only in memory. (Although, of course, there is no "only" when it comes to making memory whole – but that is a different address altogether.)
I have an old friend who has turned, in the September of his days, for we are of the same age, to painting murals for Catholic churches. (He's an Italian by ancestry, though born in Lancashire – a delighful and practical man, and if all Catholics were like him their fantasy of the reconversion of England might actually stand a chance.) He of course smiles at Jung's father's problem – those Protestants, they don't understand. And he's wise enough to know that his own creed doesn't have the full scoop, either. It does however know that story-telling nourishes in a way that the facts of the matter never do, and its heritage is that it tells its story largely through pictures. No atheist has ever feared the Bible, or seen in it a great power for harm, half as much as the Catholic tradition does - and has done for as long as it has been around. Pictures are so much safer – the priest can tell you what you should see in them.
Through my friend, I now have a preliminary grasp of Catholic iconography, of pictures designed to evoke and control a particular emotional response. But things don't always work out as the powers that be would like them to, as I was reminded when I came across one – lying in disgrace in a little-used room attached to a Catholic church – the other day. It showed three figures – Christ carrying the cross, and two women, the Virgin Mary and another woman who may have been Mary Magdalen or else Mary's mother, St Anne. It was the Virgin, a cool blonde in a blue robe, who took centre stage – not Christ, who was positioned as though he had only just managed to stagger into the picutre from one side. She seemed to have the gift of eternal youth, and I wondered if the panel hadn't been exiled from the church for that very reason – the parish got a new, and I'm told insecure, priest a little while ago: perhaps the Power of the Female was too much for him. (My Catholic friend said it was completely "off message"!)
And of course Carl Jung wasn't alone in noticing that Catholics do, in practice, accord Mary more or less equivalent status to the three "proper" figures of the Trinity itself – Maria Stella Maris, Mary Queen of Heaven, and all those other names they have for her - and none of it in the least Biblical – the line between glorification and worship is too subtle for my Protestant soul, or perhaps it's simply that I'm far more interested in what people do than in what they say they do. And underneath those names, there is another, and I will come to her later, for Mary is actually a guide to why it's sometimes said that Christianity is a wonderful religion wasted on Christians.
So what is it that Christians might, if they really took it seriously, gain from the doctrine of the Trinity?
In order to find the answer to that, we need to look not at God but at ourselves, at what it is that people through the ages have sought to find by belief in God – to turn the phrase of Boethius, what are the consolations of religion?
I understand the Christian Trinity as offering a representation of three different approaches to God, and claiming that these three represent a full picture of how women and men have sought, and continue to seek, to reconcile themselves to the human condition by entering into a relationship with a power greater than themselves, individually or collectively.
God the Father represents mythos. Originally the god or gods of the tribe or, in the case of Athens or Rome, the City – this God was pretty much exhausted two thousand years ago. It was the genius of Paul to suggest that this God, sometimes a creator, sometimes an avenger, and always pretty much inscrutable and in need of mediating angels and godlings, could also be a divinity to whom the individual soul could relate. Mythos includes accumulated religious traditions, such as the myths of the Pentatuech and the Jewish hero-kings like David and Solomon, and their counterparts in every other human culture we have ever heard of. Mythos is inescapable, but as Unitarians we don't pay it a lot of attention. This God is too often a deus absconditus, and we seem to relate to it only at a distance: when we are taken up with the beauty of nature, perhaps. Or when we do theology (if we bother to do it all) – it is a God we talk about, it is the aspect of divinity I am relating to now, but only in a distant way. The first person of the Trinity has, in fact, become the third: a God we talk about, but no longer – because our society generally and our Unitarian tradition in particular is a child of the Enlightenment – no longer a God we can talk to. We can no longer turn to God for answers which science can give us. And by science, I don't just mean physics and evolutionary theory – although they belong here, too – so much as medicine, and the medical paradigm of psychology.
But of course we do still want, sometimes, to talk to God. We tend to be better at turning to God when we are in distress, confronted with an illness of the body that attacks us, or attacks someone we love – or when we are suddenly confronted with a financial crisis – or when someone to whom we have become attached, or too attached, rejects us.
And this God is personified by the idea of Christ: the defining Western representation of pathos. Despite the Muslim tradition among others, there is no pathos in the God of Abraham. Pathos has a dim history before the teachings of the Buddha, which reached the Mediterranean world through Alexandria, and which resonated with practitioners of Egyptian mystery religion and also with the influential pagan teacher Plotinus. Whatever name we use – and maybe we use no name at all – it is the God of Suffering Overcome to whom we speak, if we speak to God at all. This is the God who is the object of supplication, to whom we pray, if we do pray, the God who knows what we're going through and who offers the healing power of Love. No small part of our trouble as Unitarians is that we are so wrapped up in talking about God that we are strangely reluctant to talk to God. One small example: how many of our business meetings begin with a moment of prayer? Shouldn't they all? Talking to God is the second person of the Trinity, and it is unmoved – it remains the hinge around which all else turns.
For many people, talking to God is as close as they dare to get. Yet if we are to renew our Unitarian tradition, becoming more willing to pray will be necessary, but not enough. For prayer need not be an end in itself, but also a gate we may pass through. There is also the possibility of knowing God, not, of course in the way that we know how to operate a computer keyboard, or know scientific facts – but the possibility of feeling whole, or at peace, or joyous – there are plenty of metaphors to describe the condition, and it is a feature of language that there can only be metaphors. In early Christian times, this possibility was called gnosis – the idea that the purpose of religion was to find the divinity within, the unification of the soul with the Holy Spirit. John called the Spirit logos, the Word. Another metaphor, and perhaps the best of them.
We have tended, with our preference for rational religion, to be suspicious of logos – it has overtones of cults, of irrational certainty, even of mental health problems. Yet a religious life which excludes the possibility of such "God consciousness" strikes me as a poor thing. If I lived such a life, I should always be in a "one down" position, unable to tell humility from humiliation. Nor do I think such direct spiritual experience needs to be – and indeed, ought not to be – an overwhelming life-changing once-for-all affair such as Paul had on the road to Damscus. For most of us, it is a case of little and often. A mundane word for it might be intuition.
Well, do you trust your intuition? Would you like to trust it more? In scientific terms, it's about freeing up the right side of your brain – and that brings me back to the Catholic fascination with Mary. For there is another iconic figure in western religion who is always female: Sophia, the personification of Wisdom. And she is female because she represents the right brain: the Knowledge that transcends logic and reason, but does not contradict them.
If there is one message which I would like us to promote, it is this: God is closer than you think. God is with you now, and the God within you is always available, if you open yourself up to the experience – through meditation, perhaps, or counting your blessings, or, as I suggested earlier, simply experiencing fully whatever is going on inside you at this moment in time – this and no other is the heart of the mystery the Gnostics sought, and the meaning of that wonderful phrase of Julian of Norwich's – all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.
Mike Killingworth