St Patrick’s Breastplate (arr. Melville Cook), sung by St Peter’s Singers of Leeds
Here’s something I heard Sunday morning in church (I’m paraphrasing, so these are my own words and no one else should be held responsible for them): Any time any of us try to talk about the Holy Trinity, we’re going to commit heresy as soon as we open our mouths.
To which I hereby enter an heartfelt plea of nolo contendre.
Now I’m one of those people who consider theology an indoor sport, and I recite the Apostles’ Creed every Sunday (well, almost every Sunday … with lapses, in spite of all good intentions, during the summer when the choir doesn’t sing). But if you try to pin me down on what it all means, I come closest to what a character in Leonard Bernstein’s Mass, says:
I believe in one God,
But then I believe in three.
I’ll believe in twenty gods
If they’ll believe in me.
Given this level of confusion, it’s an issue I’ve been wrestling with in spiritual direction.
I feel like I’m learning to sense the presence of God in many ways. In trees and flowers and clouds and stars (even though Martin Luther didn’t say that); in Holy Communion; in the people around me; in animal rescue shelters, human service agencies and their clients; in my ELCA T-shirt that says “God’s work. Our hands”; even, paraphrasing Kierkegaard in an image of the “infinite, eternal God … standing before you now with greasy hair and a bit of fish in his beard, bidding you who are weary to come to him and he will give you rest.”
But I can’t pin it down.
And this business about one God and three distinct persons “being of one substance” with the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit makes sense to me only in the historical context of second- and third-century Greeks trying to nail down the particulars of neo-Platonic philosophy.
Gregory of Nyssa, an otherwise obscure father of the early Christian church who lived in the late 300s, left us with a lovely word picture of those arguments in Cappadocia, now part of Turkey and then a province of the Byzantine Empire:
Everywhere, in the public squares, at crossroads, on the streets and lanes, people would stop you and discourse at random about the Trinity. If you asked something of a moneychanger, he would begin discussing the question of the Begotten and the Unbegotten. If you questioned a baker about the price of bread, he would answer that the Father is greater and the Son is subordinate to Him. If you went to take a bath, the Anomoean bath attendant would tell you that in his opinion the Son simply comes from nothing.
(A quick Google search of the term “Anomoean” turns up the following definition, “a sect that upheld an extreme form of Arianism, that Jesus Christ was not of the same nature (consubstantial) as God the Father nor was of like nature (homoiousian), as maintained by the semi-Arians,” and a plea in the Wikipedia headnote that “[t]his article needs attention from an expert on the subject.” [Boldface in the original.] Which of course I breathlessly await. In the meantime I’m appending a bibliographical *footnote with a detailed citation to St. Gregory, who is often quoted but not very easy to track down.)
As I wrestle with the idea of a personal God, I’ve been reading and thinking a lot recently about Jesus of Nazareth. After all, it is through Jesus that God became incarnate, according to my religious tradition.
And that, of course, leads me smack into the Trinity — and the questions that so captivated Gregory of Nyssa in the 390s. Claudia Setzer, a religious studies professor who wrote on the “Historical Jesus” for the Jewish magazine Tikkun (*reprinted online by National Public Radio), notes wryly that “[t]he emphasis on Jesus’ divinity has often eclipsed his humanity.”
Setzer, who studied at Columbia and New York’s Jewish Theological Seminary, teaches at a Catholic college and has served as chair of the Early/Jewish Christian Relations group at the Society of Biblical Literature, so she has an informed opinion. She suggests the “flesh-and-blood Jesus in the late ’20s of the first century gave way to the reconstructed and interpreted Jesus of the gospels in the ’70s and ’80s and was superseded by the ‘Christ of faith’ of the later church.”
Quoting Marcus Borg of the Jesus Seminar, Setzer adds, “If one of Jesus’ disciples had spoken of him with the words of the Nicene Creed, one can only imagine him saying, ‘What?’.”
I’ve got to admit I have a similar reaction.
During the time I’ve been wrestling with the idea of a personal God, I’ve been reading widely in the history of religion and recent best-sellers with a spiritual bent. Among them, Holy Envy by Barbara Brown Taylor, an Episcopal priest and comparative religion professor who “brought her students, who were mostly Christian,” as NPR put it, “to mosques, synagogues and Buddhist and Hindu temples” in the Atlanta area.
Taylor said her title, which I’ll admit was jarring at first, came because in each house of worship she “would walk in and immediately find something to fall in love with. The beauty of the space, the tenor of the discourse, the teacher for the evening, the hospitality we were offered. I ended up being just bowled over by the beauty and kindness that I encountered every place I went.”
And in time it led her to reevaluate her own faith. Not so much to doubt it as to interrogate it in light of the other faith traditions she and her students were exposed to.
I had something of the same reaction Sunday as I thought about the creeds, the Trinity, incarnation, the presence of God and my inability to get any of it nailed down.
So I remembered Taylor’s description of a Hindu temple she and her students visited on the south side of Atlanta, which left me perhaps a little bit envious of the diversity and flexibility of Hindu belief. And I checked Wikipedia, which I am coming to regard as an authoritative confessional source, and located its article on “Hindu deities.” I don’t know if I’d say I was envious, but I found the differences refreshing.
Taylor compares the Hindu religion to a shopping mall, with a variety of stores and boutiques. I’d say the comparison is apt. According to Wikipedia, Hindus can recognize either three, 33 or 330 million deities, depending on who’s counting, “and a Hindu can choose to be polytheistic, pantheistic, monotheistic, monistic, agnostic, atheistic or humanist.”
At the same time, the gods and goddesses “have distinct and complex personalities, yet are often viewed as aspects of the same Ultimate Reality called Brahman,” which is not exactly like the God of the Abrahamic religions but has many of the same attributes. On a separate page, Wikipedia describes Brahman as “the pervasive, genderless, infinite, eternal truth and bliss which does not change, yet is the cause of all changes. Brahman as a metaphysical concept is the single binding unity behind diversity in all that exists in the universe.”
I like that idea of a “single binding unity behind diversity.” Most striking of all, at least to me, individual Hindus don’t seem to have to nail anything down lest they be accused of heresy.
As she was beginning her book tour for Holy Envy, Taylor told Terry Gross of NPR:
If God is revealed in many ways why follow the Christian way? At my age, because it’s the way I know best. I have learned the stories. I know how to look up Hebrew and Greek. I have practiced this tradition long enough to know how many ways it can go south, and to become somewhat wiser about my own ego, needs and theological questions. To switch ships now for me would be to go back to first grade and I don’t have time to do that. … But, in terms of why choose one? I can’t honestly tell you that it’s because I’ve compared and chosen. That’s not true. This is the tradition I found myself in, and it’s the one I know. … It’s the horse I’m on, Terry!
In much the same spirit, whenever I try to wrestle with something as abstruse as the Holy Trinity, I wind up just about exactly where I began. So does Taylor. And so, as she notes in Holy Envy, did T.S. Eliot.
It sounds like maybe all three of us rode in on the same horse. Eliot, the expatriate poet who was born in St. Louis and wound up in England, once said, “… the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”
I hope I should be so lucky. But as I explore these things, I do keep arriving back where I started. Among other places, with my confirmation hymn. It’s a late Victorian Anglo-Irish rewrite of a ninth-century Irish poem traditionally (but erroneously) attributed to St. Patrick, who famously compared the Trinity to an Irish shamrock. I’ve blogged about it here and here. The details, I think, are fascinating. But what’s on my mind today is what it tells me about the Holy Trinity.
The hymn, with lyrics by Anglican church musician Cecil Frances Alexander set to a traditional Irish melody arranged by the Anglo-English composer Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, is known as St. Patrick’s Breastplate. The YouTube clip embedded above shows a choir in Leeds singing a lovely arrangement by Melville Cook, organist and choirmaster of Leeds Parish Church. The hymn begins (and ends):
I bind unto myself today
the strong name of the Trinity
by invocation of the same,
the Three in One and One in Three …
When I was growing up in the Episcopal Church, it was sung for confirmation. The words fit. “I bind this day to me forever, / by power of faith, Christ’s incarnation …” They touch on Jesus’ life, death and resurrection; on “the wisdom of my God to teach, / God’s hand to guide, God’s shield to ward”; and the Triune God “of whom all nature has creation, / eternal Father, Spirit, Word.” An especially lovely verse, I think, captures the spirit of early Celtic Christianity:
I bind unto myself today
the virtues of the starlit heaven,
the glorious sun’s life-giving ray,
the whiteness of the moon at even,
the flashing of the lightning free,
the whirling wind’s tempestuous shocks,
the stable earth, the deep salt sea
around the old eternal rocks.
The “breastplate” itself is sung to a different melody, modulating from G minor to G major. It is almost an incantation. An old, old Irish story, in fact, relates that St. Patrick and his followers sang it as they were miraculously transformed into deer and escaped from the pagan high king of Tara.
Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me.
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.
I don’t think this is quite what they had in mind when they chose St. Patrick’s Breastplate for my confirmation hymn, but 40 years later when I was struggling with the first steps of 12-step recovery and a difficult working environment at the Illinois Statehouse, I photocopied the old Irish hymn, breastplate verse and all, at 25% reduction and carried it in my billfold. An incantation? A good luck charm? I don’t know. I wasn’t transformed into a deer, and I was hostile to organized religion at that time in my life, but it helped me get through a difficult time.
We’re a long way there from good doctrine, creeds, the Historical Jesus and the nature of the Holy Trinity. But maybe — in ways I still can’t explain and am beginning to realize I probably don’t want to — it isn’t so far from what I believe.
__________
* The quote from Gregory of Nyssa appears in an eponymous blog by Roger Pearse at https://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/2009/06/19/a-famous-passage-of-gregory-of-nyssa-but-where-from/. Pearse, a layperson who created a blog on Tertullian and translated Eusebius and Origen, cites it to Gregory’s Oratio de deitate Filii et Spiriti Sancti (Oration on the deity of the Son and of the Holy Spirit). See also my June 29, 2007 post at http://hogfiddle.blogspot.com/2007/06/links-st-gregory-of-nyssa.html.
I have silently corrected the spelling (changing “Bork” to Borg) and the punctuation in the NPR reprint of Claudia Setzer’s article).
Hemlandssånger 