Father loves Son, passionately and deeply.
Father delights in Spirit, uninhibitedly.
Son obeys and reveals Father, joyfully and lovingly.
Son sports with Spirit, playfully and spontaneously.
Spirit exults in Father, adoringly.
Spirit proclaims Son, exaltingly.
Father-Son-Spirit is our ThreeOne God abounding in a ceaseless flow of outpouring and receiving love, a dynamism of eloquent creativity and silence, and a communion dance of delight and lustre — whose consummation in unassailable joyful union continually overflows in mercy and grace to all.
Lest we mistake the Three to be inherently autonomous and separated entities, we need to remember the intra-Trinitarian emptiness of both One and Three. Neither One nor Three are inherently one or three; inherently other than one or three; inherently both one and three; or inherently neither one nor three.
Rather, both One and Three are imputedly existing, dependently arisen by way of idea and word, insofar as we conceive and discourse about One and Three. Hence, One and Three are empty of inherency, contingent on idea and word for their conventional establishment.
Yet it is hard to resist the pull of discourse that says God is ineffably real in ways beyond idea and word. Idea and word fail in the end to capture what remains when all ideas and words are exhausted. Ineffability is a concept that concedes to our inability to discourse beyond word and idea, unsatisfactory but unavoidable. Finite minds that are constructs of the processes of thinking, perceiving, feeling, sensing, and intending are habitually grasped as selves.
In the end, both finite minds that are many and infinite being that is One are concessions to linguistic and conceptual discourse. The One Being itself is devoid of inherency for this reason — a process imputed as Being and impervious to capture as an entity of any kind. The same is true of the Three. Hence, only emptiness that is itself empty of inherency remains. And where emptiness is, the ThreeOne is too. God is alive!
Image credit: YouVersion Bible NRSV-CI.
