In our attempts to explain the Trinitarian Mystery in the past, we overemphasized the individual qualities of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but not so much the relationships between them. It is in the relationships themselves where all the power is! This is where all the meaning is! We can name them all with masculine words (as we have done up to now), we can name them with feminine or neutered words if you wish, but in both cases you can miss the precise way that they relate to one another—and thus miss the major point.
The Mystery of God as Trinity invites us into a dynamism, a flow, a relationship, a waterwheel of love, or a “fountain fullness of love” as Bonaventure put it. Trinity says that God is a verb much more than a noun, an energy and action more than a concept. God as Trinity invites us into a shared experience, where we are invited as participants. Some of our Christian, Sufi, and Jewish mystics trusted that all of creation was being taken back into this flow of eternal life, almost as if we are a “Fourth Person” of the Eternal Flow of God or, as Jesus clearly put it, “I will return to take you with me, so that where I am you also may be” (John 14:3). Only a Trinitarian theology makes heaven make sense. Otherwise, we simply have rewards and punishments administered by a monarch on a throne.
Adapted from
The Shape of God: Deepening the Mystery of the Trinity
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