Issue #2
We take the life and inter-relationship of the Triune God
as the inspiration and model to live and understand
the Christian life, formation, vocation and witness.
Experiencing the Trinity as our Life Centre
How then is this value expressed and embodied in our community life?
First, we always enter a time of prayer with silence and with this trinitarian opening prayer:
“Triune God of Grace ~ Father, Son, Spirit, We acknowledge your presence in this place.”
He is God. He is the First Speaker, present and active. So, we learn to be silent, wait and listen. We invoke His presence to summon ourselves to become present to His Presence.
Second, we dare call Him “Father.” The God of Moses and Elijah, the God of thunder and lightning, cloud and fire is now our Father in heaven, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, His Father and our Father.
Third, we seek to learn how to discern the presence and activities of the Holy Spirit. This seemingly reticent third person of the Trinity, is ever with us – the ever-present Spirit of life and power. He directs, moulds, draws, forms and conforms us to the likeness of Christ.
How do we discern? We practice silence, solitude (retreat), lectio divina and contemplation, spiritual disciplines core to our community life. The goal is to strengthen our spiritual sensibilities and inculcate a stronger attentiveness to His presence. The Lord is here. His Spirit is with us.
Fourth, as spiritual companions, we invoke the Presence of the Trinity whenever we sit with the storyteller. God is our home. Jesus brought us home. The Spirit reminds us we are already home. So, in His presence, we accompany our fellow Christian home through prayerful silence so that he or she too will be at home and become attentive to the Spirit Director. We always have three seats instead of two in our conversation rooms. 😊 As our triune God is the God who honours the Other, so we adopt a posture of keeping silent to listen, holding space for the storyteller. In this manner, we honour this other person.
Fifth, we further acknowledge that it is the Spirit of life that enlivens us, whether known or unknown to us. As we live our lives with the Trinity as our Centre, we learnt more and more that sitting with God in silence is not a waste of time. His enlivening fills us with life to share with others. We experiment, test, practice and then reflect on how to experience and express the life of God with us and in us. We keep reminding ourselves that the active presence of the Holy Spirit is present in all the conversations, courses, retreats and events that we offer in CSF.
In short, in our daily prayers, routines, gatherings, conversations, we invoke the name of the Father, Son and Spirit to acknowledge and remind ourselves that the triune God is here and present with us. In various renderings, our prayers would invariably be “Triune God of Grace, Father, Son, Spirit, we acknowledge your presence with us.”
Sixth, we continue to study to learn more about the Trinity. There is small collection of books on the Trinity, written by dedicated scholarly and reverent minds. They help us to search the scriptures to deepen our understanding. Thank God that a clear basic formulation of how we come to the Triune God has already been made clear:
“It is in Christ, by the Spirit that we come to the Father.”
This is also why we persist with a simple formulation of spiritual formation:
“Spiritual Formation is the process where the Holy Spirit transforms us into Christlikeness to the glory of God.” – Robert Solomon
21 Years on in the life and inter-relationship of the Trinity ~ Can we really know?
21 years on, we are still growing in our understanding of God as the Trinity. Our Lord Jesus Christ has revealed much of God to us. Much more of His triune, infinite, eternal being is concealed, unknown, even unknowable. With our triune God, there is both revelation and mystery. This mystery baffles, confounds as well as delights and inspires, drawing us to seek and love Him.
Can we really know the inter-relationship of the Trinity? The answer is yes and no. The Spirit is here with us to help us. We take encouragement from the Apostle Paul: “Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” (1 Cor 13:12)
So, now dimly but then, in glory, face to face. Indeed, even when that day comes, when we shall see the Triune God face to face – all that we know and have striven to know more, we may well discover that we have only just begun.
In truth, it may well be that this recognition of our ignorance is the strong compelling impetus propelling us to seek even more single-heartedly to experience the life of the Triune God. In this pursuit of the Trinity, unbeknown to us, His life will course through ours to become more and more the source of our life and living.
We close with a trinitarian prayer that we wrote to express our understanding and experience. This is our prayer of confidence, the outflow from abiding in and imbibing the life of the Trinity as our Centre.
A CSF Trinitarian Prayer
Almighty God, Loving Father, full of goodness and mercy,
We thank you for welcoming us home.
Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour, Lord and Friend,
We thank you for being the way for us to come home.
Holy Spirit, Spirit of Life, the One called to come alongside,
We thank you for reminding us that we are already home.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit;
as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be: world without end. Amen.