Embodying The Strangeness, Contradiction And Beauty Of God

Note: Today’s guest blogger is Kateri Boucher. Kateri grew up in the Spiritus Christi community and now lives in Detroit, Michigan (Waawiiyaatanong), and is a seminary student and Postulant for Priesthood in the Episcopal Diocese of Michigan. She says, “This blog is adapted from a homily I gave last year at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Detroit, when Trinity Sunday fell on the first Sunday in June/Pride Month.” Trinity Sunday – while it fell on May 31st this year – inagurated Pride month!

The doctrine of the Trinity may seem like an odd place to turn for queer wisdom during Pride month. 

This doctrine was first officially pronounced at the Council of Constantinople in the year 381, affirmed by the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds. Since then, the belief in a three-in-one God has served as the heart and foundation of most Christian theology, liturgy, ritual, and practice. This Trinitarian belief has become such a core teaching, so baked into the practice of this tradition, that we may come to take it for granted as a simple truth about God’s presence in the world. For those of us raised Catholic, just hearing the words “The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” may even elicit a near-Pavlovian response, finding our right hands reaching up to our foreheads to mark this belief on our own bodies.

Given the centrality of this teaching, I think it can be easy to forget that the doctrine of the Trinity does not actually point us towards some simple, comprehensible understanding of God. At its core, the doctrine of the Trinity is, in fact, based on deep paradox. On strangeness. On contradiction. 

Just a brief glance at the Athanasian Creed makes this clear. Reading like a math equation gone wrong, it shamelessly asserts (with near-dizzying repetition) that three equals one, one equals three, three equals one. 

This can be a lot to take in for those of us whose minds have been so formed and shaped by Western Enlightenment thinking, which asserts that the rational mind is our primary and even perhaps only way of truly knowing and interpreting the world. So many of us, even those of us also raised in religious settings, have been taught this. That the only true understanding comes from our rational minds, from our intellects, from the things that could fit neatly into a mathematical or scientific formula. And if we can’t figure it out that way, then it either isn’t real or it isn’t worth knowing. 

The doctrine of the Trinity flies in the face of this. 

For me, more than anything, it serves as a reminder that there are forces moving through this world that are wider and wilder than our limited human minds could possibly imagine. That this great being we simply call “God” is bigger than our most precise language, more complex than our deepest contradictions. 

Retired Episcopal priest Suzanne Guthrie writes, “The greatest minds of Christendom have applied reason, philosophical rigor, depth and breadth to understanding and interpreting the church’s experience of ‘Father’ ‘Son’ and ‘Holy Spirit.’ But in the end, knowing God is as elusive as predicting a firefly’s trajectory over a field of hay after dusk, as futile as keeping track of a drop of rain fallen into the ocean in a storm, as blinding as gazing directly at the sun.”

Really being with the paradox of the Trinity can invite us into a different way of experiencing the world, of knowing the world, that is beyond the limits of our reason and rationality. It invites us to drop down into our bodies, our hearts, our breath, our senses, our imagination – all of which are much more adept at sitting with mystery, with strangeness, with seeming-contradiction. 

It reminds me of sitting in front of a great mountain or canyon or oceanview. Just looking out at something so vast and fathomless that I literally cannot “get my mind around it” – all I can do is sit in front of it with wonder and awe. 

Growing our capacity to be with mystery, with contradiction, with that which we cannot rationally understand, can allow us to be more fully present in the world. And not just with beings in the natural world, but I think with ourselves and each other too. 

If we are each made in the image of God, as our tradition also teaches us, then perhaps this model of the Trinity has something to say about each of us too. I know that if I tried to write a succinct summary of all the deepest truths about me, it would be at least as hard to follow as the Athanasian Creed.

As Walt Whitman wrote in his poem “Song of Myself”:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

It’s not just God who is a mystery I will never quite understand! Each one of us embodies a kind of strangeness and beauty and un-reasonableness that could never be contained by the limits of our language, that could never be fully understood by our rational minds.

It feels so fitting, then, that Trinity Sunday falls at the beginning of Pride month each year. A season of honoring the unique ways that divinity is expressed in each of us – in particular those of us whose divine expressions do not fit neatly into our society’s limited labels and languages and norms. 

Reverend Rachel Mann, a priest in the Church of England, wrote, “I cannot begin to imagine anything queerer than the doctrine of the Trinity.” 

And seeing the Trinity through the lens of queerness can remind us that the stakes of how we relate to this doctrine are high. The stakes of learning to respect strangeness, to honor contradiction, to sit in front of things that we don’t fully understand are high. 

How many precious queer lives have been taken from this world because there were those who stood in front of them and could not make “sense” of what they were seeing? Because there were those who forgot that God, too, is stranger than all our social constructs, bigger than all our binaries, beyond all the machinations of our rational minds? 

One of the most meaningful conversations I ever had about my queerness was with a beloved elder in my life. She was raised in a very traditional Catholic home, and I’m honestly probably one of the first openly queer people who she’s ever talked in-depth with. Every once in awhile we’ll get to talking about queerness or different queer identities, and she’ll ask me questions about things she’s been wondering about. I’ve always felt very loved and supported by her in those conversations, but I also know that the things I’m describing are very different than what she’s been familiar with.

She’s a pretty jokey person, but one day at the end of one of those conversations, she got uncharacteristically serious and said to me, “Kateri, I just want to make sure you know something.” I said, “Of course, what is it?” And she said, “I may not always understand you. But I will always, always love you.” 

And I just immediately started crying. It meant so much more to me than if she had just said, “I totally understand you, Kateri, and that’s why I love you.” In that moment, she was saying that her love was not contingent on the limits of rational understanding, but rooted in something far deeper and wider. 

The doctrine of the Trinity, as with nearly all Christian doctrines, has been used in so many harmful ways over these centuries. It has been used to constrain and contain and limit – and claim supremacy over others who do not believe in this exact same formula for relating to the divine. 

But I also believe that, at its heart, this doctrine, in all of its beautiful strangeness and contradiction, could help open us up and expand our ways of being in the world to even wider and wilder possibilities. Contemplating the Trinity invites us to drop more deeply into our bodies and our hearts, so that we might better be able to sit in front of all that we will never be able to fully understand – from the Athanasian Creed, to the Grand Canyon, to each person we walk past on the street. 

So in the midst of this Pride month and in the wake of Trinity Sunday, may we give thanks for this strange, glorious, and mysterious God, and all those made in their image – including each of us.