Paradox
When I was a kid, my dad had records he would play on his turntable. These vinal treasures were just black discs, but they filled the den with sound on that amazing machine. He had all kinds of things. One of the wild small collections he had was a humorist’s reconfigured songs. Comedian, Allan Sherman took show tunes or popular songs, put ridiculous new lyrics to them, to entertain. Several long-playing albums came out with his work.
The biggest hit single, familiar to a couple of generations, was the novelty the text of which was a letter from a kid away at camp. Its first line is “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh, here I am at Camp Granada.” Yes, the words are ridiculous but the beautiful tune is taken from Amilcare Ponchielli’s ballet: La Giaconda: from the piece, “Dance of the Hours”. Part of the fun was the pairing of the sublime with the ridiculous.
Bear with me, I am getting to a different sort of pairing, a profound kind. A lesser-known song on one of Sherman’s albums starts with the line, “One hippopotami cannot get on a bus, because one hippopotami is two hippopotamus.” It is appropriately sung to the tune “What Kind of Fool Am I?” Okay, this has been a terribly long wind-up, but I now move on with one line from this song. One of the couplets of this song that I loved was:
A paranoia is a bunch of mental blocks,
And when Ben Casey meets Kildare, that’s called a paradox.
I am assuming you know the 1960s TV doctor dramas, “Ben Casey” and “Dr. Kildare”, so it makes a clever play on the words “pair o’ docs”. You are now convinced I am lost in this meandering, but I am truly done with the cheesy puns and songs. I want to make an application of the word “paradox.” One theological pairing that forms paradox is this couple of statements: God is transcendent and beyond us, and God is immanent and with us.
The power of paradox is how it pulls together two dialectically opposed true notions in dynamic tension, such that a spark of deeper truth is proposed. If God is transcendent, God cannot be immanent. Inversely, if God is involved with us, how can God be truly beyond us? The paradox is, God is both here and in the beyond of light unapproachable. Though each concept seems to cancel the other, we insist that God is both available and unsearchable.
When we come to Trinity Sunday, we brace ourselves for brain-strain trying to figure out how God can be one as applies to Substance (or Essence) and three as applies to Persons (or the Greek Prosopon) We go along explaining things and if we step too far in one direction, we wind up speaking of three gods. If we step too far in the other direction, we eliminate the distinctiveness of the Persons of the Trinity to protect our monotheism. I hope we can begin to see the Trinity revealed in the experience of the seeking person, as he or she begins to encounter the outreaching, self-revealing God, the Source of all being.
The Easter Orthodox theological tradition, so consistent and connected to the age of the early Councils of the church, acknowledges the “Essence” of God to be utterly unknown to finite humanity, and the “Energies” to be that which God generously reveals to seekers who in faith stretch to receive the divine experience. We might well hear in the rector’s sermon this Sunday, that the experience of the Holy, revealing differentiated aspects of a divine being, is offered within the Bible. The people who wrote the faith record, the books of the Old and New Testaments give the basics of what comes to be called the Trinity. The rudimentary elements of the doctrine of the Trinity are not created out of the conversations of the Early Church Councils. They bubble up authoritatively from the faith experience of the people of the Biblical Witness. The Councils do not germinate the elements of trinitarian language, they refine them.
I love this because to me it means that our current experience of God is the real discovery zone for God as Trinity. It was not baked in Nicaea, Chalcedon, and Ephesus and served up as a philosophical casserole for the following generations. That is a recipe for theological indigestion. People have consistently come to know God as Trinity as they encountered the Holy within their spiritual experience, and that is still how it works.
The ancient Hebrew story-teller of the creation pictured God in the beginning; pictured the Wind or Breath or Spirit of God sweeping over the face of the original waters in the formless void and darkness; pictured the Word of God coming forth in the words “Let there be…” resulting in everything that came to be.
God known and unknown, what a paradox! All the perfectly mysterious within the Holy remains ever beyond us, ever unknown. That which is revealed is offered in divine love, that we may come to know God. Your faith is the spark that flashes from that tension.