Today’s issue provides material for the 4^th of 5 sessions in our adult forum series on God of Our Silent Tears. Session 4 meets on Sunday, March 11^th.  All issues of The Rector’s Pen will be posted on our website as they are written. Quotations in today’s issue are drawn from The Rt. Rev. Dan Edward’s book “God of Our Silent Tears.” Page numbers are referenced in parentheses.

The last six chapters of Edwards’ book unpack the doctrine of the Trinity to help us understand how God is present with us in our suffering, how God’s boundless love and compassion sustains us during these times, and how with our cooperation God redeems the suffering and evil we experience.  In this section of the book, Edwards in inviting us to change our consciousness from understanding God as a dominating monarch to seeing God as a loving relationship in which the flow of love is outward, inward and around—a Divine dance (perichoresis)—a dance in which God longs for us to participate.

Edwards says that there are so many ways of imagining God it’s no wonder that primitive people were polytheistic.  God can only be described in metaphors, which are “woefully inadequate to the reality about which we speak, but they are the greatest speech of which we are capable.”  He says, “The notion of Three In One is a conundrum we can’t explain to anyone’s satisfaction, not even our own.”  The Trinity is a paradox, requiring us “to hold two opposite beliefs at the same time, which means we cannot hold either one of them very tightly.” (111, 113)  [In other words, God is only one person, and...God is also more than one person--that's the paradox!]

The doctrine of the Trinity wasn’t just “made up and imposed by a Church hierarchy…”  Nor did we choose it.  Rather, “Trinitarian doctrine was forged in the Early Church’s lived experience of God as a Eucharistic community…We discovered it in the relational space between us.  This God image emerges from life lived in communion and shared with a community of faith…To think of God as Trinity is to reject ‘modern theism.’ If God is the Trinity, God is not a powerful individual who dominates creation.  Rather, God is a web of relationship, and this web does not dominate anything.  It loves creation into being.” (110-113, 115)

Edwards says that “there are two angles, two ways, of seeing God that help in understanding God’s response to evil in the world.”  Edwards argues that both of these ways of seeing God are necessary.  “The term ‘Job-Description Trinity’…is a picture of different roles God plays in relation to us.  There is only one God—but this one God connects with us in three different ways…Taken all the way, the Job-Description model would destroy the paradox [and be heresy].  But, as part of a description, it works fine.”  Edwards calls the other model the “Family Trinity” which is more like “a family at home.”  Home here means what theologians call “the inner life of God.” The model “says the inner life of God is already, actually and eternally relational [and] interpersonal, that procreative love is the source and meaning of history…That’s what St. John means by ‘God is love.’” (118-119)

The Family Trinity and Suffering.  Quoting theologian Elizabeth Johnson, Edwards says that “At the heart of holy mystery is not monarchy but community; not an absolute ruler, but a threefold koinonia (partnership).”  (130)  Edwards follows by saying that “the God whose very nature is relationality would not and cannot create a puppet universe.”  Our autonomy “is essential to our capacity for genuine relationship with God and with each other.” (131)  Said another way, if God is not a monarch, and if God’s nature is so relational that it could not possibly permit God to control things, it helps explain why God does not will suffering and why God does not rush in to stop it.

“The Family Trinity model of God makes relationality, including compassion, the very essence of God…As any parent longs to ease her child’s suffering, God longs to ease our suffering…Then why doesn’t God do it?.. There are times when a good parent could solve the child’s problem [and does], but the good parent [also] has to let a child suffer in order to grow and learn…There are other times when the suffering is simply not in the parent’s power to overcome…Such factors as natural law, our mortality, and free will may prevent God from simply alleviating suffering with the wave of a hand…God is present not as a ruler, but as a guiding parent, as a healer and a friend.  God is here in the midst of everything. ‘The kingdom of God is within you…’ God invites but does not compel—peace and healing.”  And, Edwards  observes, “God is by and large amazingly successful.” (132-133)

“Our Family Trinity view of God gives rise to two distinct forms of hope—short-run hope for good to prevail here and now in the affairs of the world and long-run hope that in a future beyond our view all will be well…There is no situation in which God is not active, working for peace, justice, and healing.” (137)

The Job-Description Trinity and Suffering.  “When we call God, ‘Father,’ we are saying God is parental towards us.  So what kind of a Father is God?  The Father’s chief attribute is wisdom—vast impenetrable wisdom.  It comes of God’s unique perspective as the one who was in the beginning, is now, and ever will be—the one who is always and forever everywhere at once…That long view enables God to allow us our freedom, to allow the creation to run amok for a while.  Because of God’s unshakable confidence that ‘all will be well,’ such a Father cares for us but is not anxious over us.  The Father is ‘the unmoved mover’—‘unmoved in that he is not knocked off balance.  Yet God is not the ‘uncaring mover.’ God cares for us as a mother care for her children—but comes with unshaken confidence.” The Father is serenity. (145, 147)

Turning to the second person of the Trinity, Edwards says, “When we say ‘the Son,’ many people think we simply mean Jesus of Nazareth.  They are mostly right.  Jesus of Nazareth was the Son in human form.  However, John’s Gospel, the epistles to the Philippians and the Hebrews, and the creeds are clear that the Son has existed from all eternity…The Son has always been and always will be a way God connects with creation…We encounter the Father and the Son in different ways.  The Father appears to us as a vastness, a great distance.  The Son is close at hand (immanent), ‘with us always unto the end of the age…’ The Son appears to us as the present moment.” (159-161)

Edwards is critical of the substitutionary theory of atonement* and finds it “profoundly unsatisfactory.”  “We have already observed that suffering falls far too randomly to be understood as punishment for sin.  Jesus himself did not accept this notion…There is a better way to understand how the Son helps us.  In the Cross, God the Son identified with our suffering—compassionately, not manipulatively.  God is so present with the hungry that his stomach cramps.  God is so present with the lonely that his throat constricts and cannot call out for comfort.  God is so present with the grief-stricken that he cannot move.  But God does not suffer at our hands to make us feel guilty.  Rather God suffers with us to make us feel loved.” (161-162)

“But we do not go to the cross without hope if we go to the cross together with Christ and with each other.  When we bleed together, that’s Communion.  And Communion is the Divine Nature.  That’s what the Trinity signifies.  Compassion connects us to eternity and the soul of eternity extends beyond suffering.  The soul of eternity is the Father’s peace and wisdom and serenity.  And the heart of eternity is the exuberant joy that created the universe and tills it with life and beauty.  That’s where compassion leads.” (162).

Edwards agrees with theologian Katheryn Tanner that “Christ did not suffer in order to enshrine suffering, but to overcome it.  Jesus assumed affliction, taking on human pain and vulnerability, all the way into a disgraceful death, and then overcame that affliction in the resurrection and ascension.  That has made a basic difference in the order of things.  Suffering and death still happen, but they do not get the final word.”  Edwards believes that the Son assumes suffering and death not for our sins but to overcome evil and death, restore the wholeness of life, and give us hope. (166)

Edwards next describes third relationship in the Triune God, the Holy Spirit. The Greek word for “spirit” is pneuma, meaning breath or wind.  “The wind blows where it wills and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes.” (John 3:8)  Edwards says we know the Holy Spirit through its actions in our midst…Many people today confuse the Holy Spirit with religious emotions, especially ecstasy…[Our feelings may be a response to the Spirit, but] they are too flimsy, too flighty, and too easily manipulated to be equated with the eternally faithful God.” (173)

“The Spirit is the divine force that gives and restores life…St. Paul teaches that the Spirit dwells in us, but we also dwell in the Spirit…The Spirit fills us just as breath fills our lungs and infuses our blood with oxygen, but the air we breathe extends around the world and far into the sky.  The Spirit is vastly larger than we are.  It permeates us but we cannot contain it…The Spirit gives us life when we are in death, empowers us to do what must be done…In the face of affliction, we need power.  Sometimes it is the power to show up for another round of chemotherapy; sometimes it is the power to fight an injustice; sometimes it is the power to resist an addictive impulse.  We often don’t have that power within ourselves.  But the Holy Spirit has deep wells of power available to strengthen us…The ultimate action of the Holy Spirit is to connect us with God.  The Spirit draws us into the Trinity, into the swirling vortex of Trinitarian Love.” (173, 174, 176, 179)

Edwards concludes his discussion of the Job-Description Trinity by saying, “The combined action of the Triune God is mysteriously greater than the sum of its parts.  The Serene Center, the Fellow Sufferer, and the Empowering Spirit together work a change in us that begins with the miracle of facing another day and ends in the joyful promise of Resurrection into the New and Endless Day.” (181)

*Substitutionary atonement: That Jesus suffers on our behalf so we will not have to bear that pain or pay the price of our sins.  The underlying premise is that afflictions are God’s punishment for our sins.  Jesus’ death on the cross helps by taking some or all, depending on the theology, of the punishment for us.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1.      Have you ever danced a circle dance?  What was it like?

2.      When the world becomes too much for you, where do go or what do you do to get some distance?  Mountains? Beach? Music? Other?  How might God be like or ‘in’ those places, activities or music?

3.      How do we respond to suffering?  We have been asking in some depth what God does when we suffer.  The more pressing question should be what we should be doing.  How should we act in the face of our own adversities and those of others?  Edwards suggests the following possible responses: submission, stoicism, rebellion, or Trinitarian (serenity, compassion, restoring life and strength).  Can you name a time(s) when you or others you personally know have responded in one or more of these ways?

4.      Can you think of incidents in your life where God might have been involved in the situation without controlling it?  How might God have influenced the course of events without overriding your freedom?

5.      Name a time when someone voluntarily shared a hardship with you?  How did it make you feel about them?  Did your feeling for them change your experience of suffering?

6.      Have you experienced what Edwards calls “gracious serendipity,” the right person, word, book or opportunity coming along at just the right moment to give you hope or somehow sustain you in a hard time?