Some people take this passage to mean Jesus is "the finger pointing at the moon, not the moon" but when I read it, I think of the trinity ... father, son and holy spirit - one person. Larry mentioned in his post that he doesn't pray to Jesus. I don't think I do that, exactly ... I pray through Jesus, to God, with the help of the holy spirit ... but mostly I just hang around with Jesus and talk to him, appreciating the differences between him and God, relying on the sameness of him and God.
There are some references to the trinity of persons in the NT ...
Matthew 28:19 - Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Spirit.
2 Corinthiians 13:13 - The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the holy Spirit be with all of you.
... but I think the crucial test of the trinity is in experience. God and his love for us might seem so mysterious and "other", except for Jesus ... God gave his love's expression a human body so we could experience it in ways that are familiar. Fr. Marsh once wrote on Trinity Sunday ...
We’ve all been raised to believe that God loves us but somehow we tend to believe that all the risk and all the feeling are on our side … that God is so big and self-sufficient that nothing we do can really make a difference to God—really hurt or really delight. But today’s feast says the opposite and invites us into its mystery. Have you ever loved someone so much that you feel you’ve lost your self to them? That all your future depends on them? That your heart wakes or breaks with theirs? If you’ve known that pain, that daring, that delight then know now that God looks upon you with just that kind of love ...
... thanks to Jesus, the moon.
3 comments:
I love what Fr. Marsh wrote in this: "...invites us into its mystery. Have you ever loved someone so much that you feel you’ve lost your self to them? That all your future depends on them? That your heart wakes or breaks with theirs? If you’ve known that pain, that daring, that delight then know now that God looks upon you with just that kind of love ..."
I feel like I do know this kind of love, of being 'not-two' but one, a kind of merging of hearts. It does take a bit of courage to love this way, a daring, and it does open you to feel exactly as another feels - both the pain and the joy and all the feelings in between. It is an amazing sort of love, and it does feel like loving the way God loves. It is a very rich experience - a feeling, as Rumi the poet says, almost "too full to speak about."
Thanks, Meredith. Yes, Fr. Marsh was good at homilies :-). If you'd ever like to check out some of the ones he wrote, he has them posted here at a website he has.
Meredith, I like how you described the merging of hearts --that is very useful to me. Thank you. It sounds like perfect love.
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