Prayer

Lord as we ponder your words open our hearts that we may understand and know you. Amen 

Sermon    

Albert Einstein said “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed. “

Perhaps a little more to the point are the words of Gertrude Stein “There ain't no answer. There ain't going to be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer.” 

Einstein, the dreamer, Stien, the realist.

We sometime in the business of life lose site of the spiritual. In my studio/tv room sits an unfinished Icon of the Holy Trinity.    It’s not my first icon.   Creating Icons has its own language although you are painting, it is called writing. When you are tracing your icon onto the board it is called translating.  The writing of an Icon is a spiritual journey. The icon is not art, but is artistic.     The Icon is an integral part of the Eastern Christian tradition. They are not to be worshiped but seen as a lens to encounter the sacred and the holy.  A centering for prayer, invocation to the saints.  They are a vehicle of faith. 

Peter Pearson in his book, A Brush with God writes about how the Roman Church has over the centuries has liked a rationalistic approach to explain God. The thinking, realist.  As compared to the Eastern Church which has “recognized that it can only say so much about God in finite, human ways before it must go silent before the mystery of the infinite and unspeakable.” It is through the artist, poet, and musician that we come to understand God on a deeper heart felt level.   To enter the mystery and the silence. To experience the sacred   

When we slow ourselves, center ourselves to listen and see into the silence we allow the heart and the soul to connect with the Divine. 

 This is not to dismiss doctrine and theology. The idea of the Trinity is a creation of the early church. The gospels don’t speak to the Trinity. Theologians have argued the point and written volumes trying to explain what it is. 

St Patrick uses a shamrock three parts but one plant. The Father the Son, The Holy Spirit/Ghost three in one and one in three.   Perhaps rather than trying to explain the Trinity we should take a page from the Iconographers book and move beyond the explanation and embrace the mystery of the many ways that one can encounter the divine. To not be rational but to be the dreamer. To move into the silence. 

I have a colleague that before she preaches she calls people to the silence to center the soul to open the mind. It is in the silence that we can encounter the divine. I was watching a movie and spoke of the silence of space. A place where one can lose themselves and direction or find themselves and direction. 

 Rather than try to explain or postulate on the Trinity, I would suggest we just accept it as mystery of the faith.  Today once more we are reminded that  we  need to silence ourselves and open ourselves to see beyond “what is there” to “what can be there.” 

What can be there is the infinite presence of God and God’s love

   God’s love found in all of creation, God giving wholly of himself in becoming and giving Jesus and the forgiveness of the Cross.  That continued presence in the Holy God Spirit God continuing to act in our life. God known and still God whose finite ways which are still mystery to be discovered.

 God who knows days as millennium in our understanding, so vast that all of creation is done in but six days for God but billions of years by our understanding. God who is not contented with one but many. Not one tree, one colour of flower, one animal but many and varied  A minimum of 146 new types of  species where discovered in 2022. 

God who continues to surprise us. If we allow ourselves to be moved to encounter the divine. 

God who fills every aspect with his generous love like lilac filling the air with perfume