Three Aspects of Worth: A Unitarian / Trinitarian Paradigm

from Richard Carl Wolf
June 16, 2013

Many years before I actually left the Catholic Church, I gradually left the belief in God as a “Trinity of Persons”. Thanks to the native elders who adopted me and the scholars of phenomenology who taught me, I moved around ideas of God as exclusively a “someone”; a someone who required or even appreciated anything like a worship of “Him.”

Yet I still wonder how to translate Trinitarian God paradigms into my post-Christian, quasi-atheistic theology. While naming persons of God just doesn’t work for me anymore — too much like making God in human image – I still want to be able to enter into an attitude of prayer (a raising of the mind and heart) with the Catholic priest who comes to visit my husband, with school officials who begin meetings with Christian prayer language, and when twelve step meetings close with the Lord’s Prayer.

So while I’m hearing the words of the “Sign of the Cross,” or listening to people address a “Heavenly Father”, or pray “in Jesus’ name” – my mind translates the “persons” of God into qualities that a “mystery” of God might hold. I’ve turned “three Persons in one God” around to a contemplation – a consideration of the worth – of three God’s in one person – and that one person being me, you, and each “one” who moves around here.

For me Father God, the creator, is the simple and apparent fact of being – I am – and apparently you are, too. The second Person, the Son, the redeeming One, is potential, the power to keep on becoming. And the third Person, always the least like a person of all, is the fact of our breathing – our capacity to move on to something more – personal and communal actualization.

If I do something like “worship,” it’s when I recollect at least these three aspects of life’s Great Mystery. My Holy Trinity is fact of being, potential in being, and actualization of being, together with you and all my relations.

Here’s a humanist, or maybe a UU, sign of the cross: Mind knows the worth of being; Heart holds the worth of potential; arms make goodness real, performing worthy deeds.