Three is Not a Crowd

The theme of this blog, as I tried to articulate it in “A Welcome Message” at the top of the site, is about the richness of contrasting experiences.  In that first essay, I offered the image of how a certain color of a wall meets a contrasting color of a ceiling….just two colors.  Today, though, I’m imagining the juncture of two walls – each with a different color, unusual as that may be –meeting that same ceiling: three instead of two, in other words.   Why?  Because last week was Trinity Sunday in church – a day to reflect upon how the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit can come all woven together and yet also retain their separate characteristics.

So, living mostly in the regular world as I do, I have been thinking about trios, triples, tricycles and tripods every since. Even the peonies in front of the house look to be in three different sections:  not quite blooming, in full bloom, and past blooming.

My husband gets peeved when anybody takes the word “Trinity” and reduces it to a dull translation of three-ness.  He says this trivializes the splendid fullness of the theological doctrine.  But I say, drawing upon my teaching experience, that we can really only incorporate new knowledge by attaching it to knowledge we already have.  So in my quest to understand the Trinity, I might start by diving back into John Donne’s magnificent sonnet that I read years ago.  The number three is indeed there, involved in some pretty intense action – outright violence even — as well as spirit: “Batter my heart, three-personed God; for you/As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;/That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me…”  Now that I’m a clergy spouse as well as the mother of an almost- 20 year old son who is a boxer, I can’t help but read the paradoxes in this poem in a fuller way than I did when I was in college.

Back in the days before we were married, and since, Rob has talked about how our relationship really consists of the two of us plus one – God.  I didn’t absorb this news very easily, and frankly, it can still seem a little creepy.  Here I thought that he and I had carved out something special on our own; come to find out that somebody else is peering over the couch at us?  Well, OK, I know that’s not exactly it.   My husband would say that the third part is the part that makes sure we stay together through all kinds of times, the bond that takes on a kind of life of its own.  Or, as St. Augustine talks about in his ancient work called De Trinitate there’s the lover, the beloved, and the love itself.   This spirit of love can be thought of as a binding force or, in a contrasting image, as a kind of warm broth in which the other two beings float together.

Of course it’s simplistic to think of Trinity Sunday as a day featuring the number three, but honestly, shifting to another realm with which I’m familiar, could it be just a coincidence that there have been so many triple kinds of things going on in sports recently?  Bear with me a minute here.

For starters, yesterday was the running of the Belmont Stakes, third race of the Triple Crown.  Very few horses have won this coveted prize, and the main story this time was the pulling of “I’ll Have Another” the day before the race.  This act showed the kind of humane spirit we’d like to see more of in this sport, in that the beginning signs of tendonitis were not ignored and the horse’s well-being came first for a change.  Looking at Sports Illustrated today, I read how the baseball player Josh Hamilton –who has been battling addiction for some time – is currently racking up “Triple Crown numbers” in his current season with the Texas Rangers.  For those of you who don’t follow Major League Baseball, these statistics are about this triumvirate:  homeruns, runs batted in, and batting average.    Furthermore, Hamilton and his wife run a foundation called “Triple Play Ministries.”  Oh, AND, by the way, his religious faith is so central to his life now that “he has a near-constant interior dialogue with the Holy Spirit.”

Closer to home, our high school’s boys track team has just completed their own triple crown by winning the Western Massachusetts sectional championships. Since they also won a cross-country title in the fall and the indoor track one in the winter, they are undisputed champions.  They have been led by a phenomenal triple jumper who hopped, stepped and jumped his way to a 4^th (not 3^rd) consecutive title this spring, leaving spectators in awe.

This tall and talented young man walked up to the podium to collect his diploma the other evening a few minutes after our daughter did.  It occurred to me, while sitting with my husband, our two sons and their grandmother, that I may tend to see things in threes partly because that’s the number of children I have.  My attention has been sliced out that way every day for the past thirteen years (myself and my spouse being other kinds of slices) and I’ve grown accustomed to it.  Maybe if I’d had two kids, or four or five, I’d be more attuned to how those numbers manifest themselves all around us.

To repeat, I know that my husband is saying right now, with some vehemence actually, that all of this is reducing an ontological reality that has to do with the nature of Being itself to silly coincidences.  But maybe his understanding of the Trinity, from which I am willing to benefit, points to an acknowledgement that we live in a household which is larger than the sum of the two of us.  Amen.