Trinity:  Model for the Church
Speech by Gloria Blanchfield Thomas, Ph.D.
June 17, 2003

It is really great to be here.  I am honored to speak to an organization that I truly admire and feel part of even though I am from the Newark Archdiocese.

Since Therese asked me a couple months ago, I began thinking about a new model of the church, or actually about an ancient model - one the Gospel offers us. It is a model based on our most fundamental doctrine of God--- the Trinity.

I'd like to begin by telling two stories, brief yet significant moments in my own life.  They tie me to this model of church and make if for me far more than an academic study.

A few weeks ago my little grandson, Patrick Thomas Hagerty, made his First Communion.  His family surrounded him as he took this big step in his Catholic faith life.  Far more than this little boy could understand he became part of a Church community, a Church community that shares and celebrates faith around a table, a church community that knows its identity sharing a meal, sustained by the real presence of Jesus, the Christ.  I knew as I stood there, watching my solemn little grandson, part of his loving, supportive family, I knew this was my church at its very best.  It was a moment clearly celebrating who we are.

My second story is very different.  On a Sabbatical year, several years ago my husband and I with my son and his Korean wife visited Korea, Hong Kong and Indonesia.  In Bali, Indonesia , we toured a Hindu temple.  We had on our black and white checkered shawls, symbolic of our good and evil, as we approached the inner temple.  Our guide was a young man, early twenties.  He was explaining the carvings on the temple walls.  At one place, he pointed to three connected images, Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu - 3 faces of one God.  He was carefully explaining in his hesitant English that there was only one God, but that Hindus knew this God in 3 ways, 3 manifestations - the Trimurti or Trinity.  Our young guide was trying to make sure we understood that only one God exists, yet that God exists in this triune dynamic community.

Here I was in Indonesia, about as far from New Jersey as you can get, and a young Hindu was explaining the Trinity.  I was astounded.  I felt tears coming down my face.  After we left my son said, "Mom the next time that poor guy explains it and some American tourist gives him a ho-hum nod he's going to say to himself : 'What happened to my explanation?  The last lady cried!'"  That really started me thinking about the Trinity.  We've always said, the Mystery of the Blessed Trinity, blessed ourselves in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit - and pretty much shelved the doctrine as simply too mysterious, too deep to really effect our lives.

Tonight I want to offer some ideas about how the Trinity is the very essence of our faith, our understanding of God and how it does offer us practical applications of great significance for our lives in the Catholic Christian community - a model of Church based on Divine life, Divine Community.

So what is the Trinity?  What is it really?  What is God-s being?  God-s nature?  That we believe it is three-fold?  I ask your patience while we do a little theology about the Trinity before we get to its very real applications for Church.  First of all, there are not two Trinities, one intra-divine and one of human experience.  God does not have a private life, a life of self-containment as three persons.  There is one God, one Trinity, one divine self-communication manifest in creation.  It is God's actions that reveal God.  God's actions in creation manifest God.  In a real sense, God's actions are God.  Karl Rahner, the great German theologian of our time tells us that - "God's self-communication consists precisely in the fact that God really arrives in humanity, enters the human situation, assumes it, and thus is what God is."  God's being - in  relationship - to us is what God is.  God's interactive, not solitary.  There is not God off by Him or Herself existing in a heavenly private life.  God is a relational God, and we are gradually being perfected in that image, in the image and likeness of God.  The Greek fathers called this process theosis.  St. Irenaues in the 2nd Century said "God became human so we could become divine." The doctrine of the Trinity stresses the relational communal character of personhood, which is God and God's life with us.  God reveals Divine Life, as Communal and Jesus is what God is - Infinite capacity for loving community, and it is the Holy Spirit who unites persons into communion.  God is the origin of love (1John; God is Love) and the origin of existence, and this God is always present to us (God is everywhere) always seeking everlasting communion with all creatures.  God is then essentially relational, dynamic, outreaching, passionate love.

In studying the Trinity, I reflected upon the ideas of our great theologian, St Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and in our own time Karl Rahner, but it is Catherine Mowry LaCugna to whom, I owe most of these insights.  Dr. LaCugna taught at Notre Dame and died a few years ago at a very young age, a terrible death from cancer.  She left us with a great theology book, her research and insights on the Trinity.  God For Us - Her clear contention is that the only God that exists is the God for Us.  Her book received the Catholic Press Association First Place award for theology. Dr. LaCugna theologically traces the Church's understanding of the Trinity through the centuries, pointing out that the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity has been locked up in itself.

Obviously, we know God on the basis of God's relationship with creatures since as Thomas Aquinas tells us we are not able to know God's essence directly.  And St. Bonaventure tells us God creates because God is by nature self-diffusive.  God always creating (Father, Mother) always communicating (Son, Word) always energizing, divinizing (Holy Spirit).

All human language about God, all images, wonderful as they are, are inadequate, limited.  Augustine, Fifth Century, images the Trinity as Lover, Beloved, and the Love between them - a dynamic community.  Tertullian Third Century speaks of a "root, a shoot and a flower."  Different roles yet connected, communal, One.

Remember God is what God does.  God is more a verb than a noun.  I'd like to offer my own image of the divine - inadequate obviously.  I image God as a waterfall - a waterfall simply has no existence without a source, an energy, and a contact.  If a waterfall is not active, it is not.  The only God that exists is actively in relationship with us, the God for Us.

Now what does all that theology say to us, say about us, about how we are to be, to live, and how we are to be Church?  I think it says a great deal.  The Trinity is drained of its meaning if it is only about a mystery of God's inner life, no esoteric that even on Trinity Sunday we rarely hear much about it or about its deep significance in the life of the Church.  Through the centuries we have marginalized this essential part of our faith.

As God is outgoing love, so I believe it is God's providential plan for us who participate in the Divine life of God to live ways of relationship of outgoing love that help build God's Kingdom, serve the reign of God.

Orthodoxy is the conformity of doctrine to the reality of God's glory revealed to us.  Orthodoxy is right doctrine.  And there is only one authentic way to protect orthodoxy, that is orthopraxis.  Orthodoxy is believing what is true, and very simply orthopraxis is living what is true.  As we all know it is far easier to profess what is true (and the Church through the centuries has made a huge fuss about that) than it is to live what is true.  No one has ever been burned at the stake for not loving one's neighbor or not feeding the hungry.   Actually I've come to believe and understand right doctrine by seeing it lived.  We believe Jesus spoke the Word of God, but even more clearly we can see Jesus is the Word of God.  Jesus shows us God, overflowing love, agape, the kind of love where one gives oneself away.  Jesus showed us how, and continues to through Eucharist, the total giving away of Himself.  Total self-gift is what God is.  And it is in a giving community that God is experienced.

If love is to see with another's eyes, loving God is to see with God's eyes.  And as Yves Congar, the great Vatican II theologian, tells us God is "not the eternal celibate of the centuries, but self-communicating love and goodness."

Despite our professed belief in the Trinity we have actually moved away from a God whose principle is shared, from a God who is relational, from a God of communion.  We slipped back from the egalitarianism of Jesus, the around the table model, the equality, the shared meal model to a Greco-Roman patriarchal structure.  The three persons of God are equal.  There is no subordination.  Let me say this clearly.  Primacy of communion among equals - not superiority is the Hallmark of the Reign of God.  Hierarchy, patriarchy, monarchy - these are based on non-Trinitarian thinking.  Non-Trinitarian theology of God opens the door to every kind of ideology or idolatry.  Divine monarch without the dynamic overflowing love of the Trinity justifies all kinds of oppression.  Sub-ordination is not natural but decidedly unnatural.  It violates both the nature of God and the nature of persons created in the image of God.  Subordination is certainly not Christian - not of Christ.  Our hierarchical system does not reflect the nature of our triune God.

We are a eucharistic community, a church of service, of foot washers.  When Jesus spoke of authority, the word used is Exousia - service - "Servants of the servants of God."  How is that being lived?

The Church worked so hard to remove all sub-ordination in the doctrine of God, then produced that same subordination in its vision of social, personal, and ecclesial relations.  The need to dominate is a disorder, for human existence is grounded in a Being whose To Be (whose very existence) is to Be For.  Our Church should reflect, should manifest our understanding of God - a triune God.  Baptism calls us all into communion.  And if Eucharist is not a sacrament inclusive of the whole community, it contradicts itself.

Jesus, we believe is the Incarnation of God, Jesus fleshed out God, and the role of the Church (all of us) is to flesh out Jesus.  We are not a self-serving, self-protecting Church.  Our task as Church is to be the Incarnation of the Incarnation.

So what kind of Church incarnates Jesus?  What kind of Church reflects the Trinity?  What kind of Church truly promotes "Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done on earth as it is in heaven."?

Our church does have a long hierarchical tradition.  Yet, it is the Gospel that came forth from the early church; it is the Gospel that reflects the Church of the apostles, the vision of its founder.  It is our understanding of God who is overflowing, agapic, waterfall love, a God who always is creating, self-communicating and divinizing.  It is this God of three equal persons, who enables us to envision a new model of Church- a new model with ancient apostolic roots.

I have a few practical suggestions, visions of how this could begin to happen.  Some of my visions are already happening, but not nearly enough, and those that are already in place, possibly lack the equality aspect.  Attitudes cemented in hierarchical values often lack the capacity of real listening; they preclude the true existence of a hierarchical Church, listener, learner, and teacher.  Communication, sacred dialogue, is the lifeblood of community.  The hierarchical system makes honest open communication nearly impossible.  Certainly, we know, the present dialogue in the hierarchic church does not model a self-communicating God of 3 equal persons.

My first vision is one of a responsible decision-making, highest-level commission of women and men.  In my imagination the Holy See eagerly calls these people from the entire Catholic world, all races, cultures, ages, religious, married, and single vocations.  This World Commission/Community would serve with the present decision-makers of Rome.

Imagine the magisterium actually considering this World Body - (for lack of a better word, these lay-people).  They would be mothers, fathers, people in ministry, educators, artists, Scripture scholars, architects, theologians, students.  They would be considered by the Magisterium as capable, as empowered, Spirit guided to make decisions affecting the faith lives of the world's Catholics - ordained and lay.  The members of such a group would be thought of as modern-day apostles.

Imagine the Roman hierarchy and the hierarchy of the world eager to listen, to learn, to trust and even affirm and applaud the gifts of these serving people.  This community of non-ordained people would fully share in the decision-making charism - one now so unnecessarily intertwined with hierarchy.  Imagine the CDF (Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith) working with this group of world representatives, working with openness and trust, and faith, faith that God's energizing Spirit was empowering to all.  Everyone would come to understand that Church governance and leadership are for the sake of community, for real communion.

Imagine the Magisterium coming to truly believe that the world's ordinary Catholics are concerned with preserving our tradition, with revelation, and with the development of doctrine and with the ever-ancient, ever-new articulation of the Gospel.

Imagine a sub-committee of married people to deal with the questions of marriage and family and decisions concerning the sacrament of marriage.  And could we imagine that no Pope would ever shelve their decisions, but would believe that the Holy Spirit would be guiding them too.  Imagine a committee studying sexual health, the sacred gift of sexual expression - a gift where power isn't to be used, where subordination, secrecy, fear, manipulation and domination have no part.  This sub-committee would promote sexuality, sexual expression as a gift of loving relationship, equality and communion.  (We certainly have the foundation right here for such a group).

In my imagination a type of Church Peace Corps will exist - the present lack of ordained vocations seems to point that way.  Perhaps internships of non-ordained people serving in a parish or a diocese for a year or two - answering through a type of temporary religious vocation the Call of their Baptism.

On a diocesan level, image the Bishops of the world meeting regularly with the diocesan people, eager to learn, to listen to share the leadership charism, bishops, even archbishops and cardinals eager to be in touch with their people, to really understand the vocation of parents.  Together they would share the struggles of community governance around a table; bishops, parish priests, lay people, the Body of Christ, learning and teaching and praying together - a community in the image of our Triune God.

And on a local level, imagine pastors encouraging women and men to share their faith experiences, their understanding of Scripture, inviting them to give witness, insisting that some women and men, offer Sunday Homilies so that the faithful of the world would not hear only clerical, celibate men breaking open the Word of God and applying it to their experience.

Imagine the Catholic clergy of the world, from parish priests to the Bishop of Rome, sharing gifts, truly being the Body of Christ, sharing a heartfelt, passionate desire to build a totally Catholic "Everybody Come" inclusive community - perhaps even using inclusive language to make all feel welcome. 

My vision is a communal, collegial, inclusive vision of Church.  It speaks of a community of equals, different roles yet equal, one based on the Trinity, welcoming and cherishing everyone, protecting not its own institution, but the world's children, truly a Mother Church. 

Indeed, it would be at times messy and difficult.  Our brokenness, our very human, human nature would need much patience, humility and faith.  Many failures would occur, but it is the direction to which I believe we are being called.  The present system/ structure has both served us and failed us.  Change is not easy for people, but for people of faith it is possible.  We are, after all One in Christ, neither male nor female, Greek or Jew, master or slave, cleric or lay.  We share the life of God; we participate in the Trinity.

If we ever begin to move together toward this model of Church, a Church of Holy Dialogue , all of us would be called to trust one another and trust the Holy Spirit (which is really the same trust).  We would see that a new model of Church, like new wine may demand new wine skins.  These might be structures, less clandestine, less oppressive, abusive, less self-protecting structures more open, transparent more just, and more life-giving.  If we were truly moving together we would have no fear of changing structures, as we shared the gifts of the Spirit, we would be open to the surprises of the Spirit and the freedom of the Spirit.  We would truly be the People of God, a Pilgrim People, praying and serving together in a Mother Church whose motto includes the words -   Ecclesia   Semper   Reformanda - the Church, our Beloved Church, Always in Need of Reform.

In the Name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen
Thank you.
Voice of the Faithful
6/17/03

Gloria Blanchfield Thomas, Ph.D.