
Unless the eye catch fire,
The God will not be seen.
Unless the ear catch fire
The God will not be heard.
Unless the tongue catch fire
The God will not be named.
Unless the heart catch fire,
The God will not be loved.
Unless the mind catch fire,
The God will not be known. — William Blake
This Sunday is the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity. This is the first of two ‘dogmatic’ Sunday feasts that allow us to recover our equilibrium in the wake of Pentecost and peer into the cracked window in Heaven, the shattering-Day that ended in Flames as God slammed into the earth with an infinite force, leaving the Church behind as the great crater formed by Christ’s impact.

Trinity Sunday gathers the Church at the edge of that crater and allows us to be-hold the Mystery in fragile shards of human language. While the second dogmatic feast of Corpus Christi allows us to ingest Mystery into the fragile clay of our image-bearing bodies. Beneath the homely surface of the human body burns the glorious magma of trinitarian Life.
And so it is eminently true that these twin Feasts allow us little stability beneath our feet as they posit at the ground of all existence what Meister Eckhart called the Ebullitio — a limitless, beginningless, unfathomable Abyss of boiling-over Being endlessly giving itself away. We say God is changeless, but certainly in no sense we are familiar with. St. Gregory Nazianzen thus calls God rest-in-motion, unsettling logic with paradox. Our foundation is a God “born of the Father before all ages,” who Twice (or Once?) timelessly emanates forth a Third infinite Face of Love that binds this true-God-from-true-God as One, Thricely. Father, Son, Spirit, one in Essence and undivided.
Apologies, but once I migrate into Trinity my language trips.
We must sing with the Armenian Liturgy:
O Mystery deep, inscrutable, without beginning.
Thou hast decked thy supernatural realm
as a chamber unto the light unapproachable
and hast adorned with splendid glory
the ranks of thy fiery spirits.
And echo with Augustine, Si enim comprehendis, non est Deus — “if you understand, it isn’t God.” Which is why St. Paul says, “you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God.” (Gal. 4:9). He can’t be known directly, but in the experience of being known in love by him, we come to know him — like this:
Because you are children,
God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts,
crying, “Abba! Father!” (Gal. 4:6)
Being known by a God who loves himself in us, with us. Read 4:6 again — this is forever happening in God, and you’re ‘let in.’ This is prayer, the only path to knowing Trinity, and it rightly reduces you to child’s language. Prose to poetry to stammering to silence.
Our two great Looking Glasses into this chasm Mystery — creation and redemption — afford us small comfort if we seek some easy idol to wrap our minds around and tame to our wishing. No! Instead we see: At the beginning of things, a God speaking existence out of nothing, setting us precariously (!) on the precipice of non-being, forging us each as an inescapable act of utter dependence. No wonder we, dizzied and grasping at divinity, fell! Yet, only to then hear the Father’s with-us-falling Word who spoke into our encroaching non-existence ever-rising Life, Eternity — what exactly is that? His, now our Eternity knows neither dawn nor dusk; past nor future; here nor there. Only love, amor ipse notitia est, which is itself a form of knowing.
And so these two Feasts, born of All Three, are all from, and all form love.
Love.
What exactly is that?
Well, look Up, look around you, see Their Faces, see your neighbor’s face. There, there, there is love, awaiting. Nearby, see the crater? Jump in.
Y así, por toda dulzura
Nunca yo me perderé,
Sino por un no sé qué
Que se halla por ventura.
And so even for all sweetness
I will never lose myself,
but for an I-know-not-what
that fortunately is found. — San Juan…de la Cruz
Eternal Light has come among mankind
Yet mankind has chosen darkness
If we openly confess
We need his light
We need his love
Light has created all the world
Yet the world did not receive him
If we walk within the light
As He is the Light
He is the light
Though we have sinned we’ll stand forgiven
Bridge: (a complex polyphony containing these phrases)
The Lord our God is One
The Lord our God is One
The Lord is watching from on high
He is watching from on high
The Lord is One
So let us come as little children
To turn from the sins of prideful men
So let us come with hearts of sorrow
So we may know his joy again
To be with him now as little children
(Be with him now as little children)
So when he reveals himself again
(He will come again)
We shall not stand within the darkness
(We are not children of darkness)
So walk in his light until the end
We need his light
We need his love
We need to stand forgiven
Lyrics found here