Abbot Brendan osb
There was once an old lady who picked up a book entitled ‘The Simplicity of God’. She read a few pages, put the book down and said, ‘Well, if that’s His simplicity I wonder what His complexity is like’.
And there is our mistake. God is not a puzzle to be solved, or a complicated machine we can dismantle and examine to see how it works.
If you want your children to know about life today, would you tell them that we are a mini chemical factory of about 30 trillion cells that perform 10,000 chemical functions. That we have 206 bones, 639 muscles, 4 million pain sensors in the skin, 750 million air sacs in the lungs, 16 million nerve cells, and our brain, on average, processes over 10,000 thoughts and concepts each day. Are you any the wiser? It’s important to know how to ask the right questions and how to give appropriate answers.
One person who knew how to ask the right questions was the Venerable Bede, a seventh, eighth century Benedictine monk whose feast we celebrated yesterday. Bede was super intelligent, one of the greatest minds of the Middle Ages. He wrote extensive biblical commentaries, inspiring sermons, treatises on nature and astronomy, poetry, hagiographies, and history. We are now in the year 2024, because Bede adopted this system of dating based on the birth of Christ and everyone since has copied him. While he delighted in teaching, reading and writing, a lot of his life actually involved praying. According to Alcuin of York, Bede used to say, ‘I know that angels visit us at the hours of prayer. What if they should not find me there among my brethren? Will they not say, ‘Where is Bede? Why hasn’t he joined his brothers in prayer?’ Prayer, for Bede, involved people gathering together to participate in the life of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. He was fascinated by the Trinity and liked to use a Greek word, perichoresis, meaning ‘going around’, to describe this.
So let’s adopt the method of Bede and go back to the beginning so that we too might understand. In the Book of Genesis, immediately following the episode where Abraham made his covenant with God and God promised to be our God forever, Abraham has a visit
… as he sat at the door of his tent by the oaks of Mamre. He lifted up his eyes and looked, and saw three men in front of him. He ran from the tent door to meet them, and bowed himself to the earth, and said, “My Lord, if I have found favour in your sight, do not pass by your servant. Let a little water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree, while I fetch a morsel of bread, that you may refresh yourselves, and after that you may pass on—since you have come to your servant.” So they said, “Do as you have said”.
Later, much later, Jesus repaid the compliment, fetched water and washed our feet. He also gave us bread, his body, to eat, that we might be refresh. Here we begin to understand the Trinity and here we can enter into the life of the Trinity.
So, don’t be short changed by someone telling you that the Trinity is simply beyond us. Explore this mystery for yourself, like our friend Bede. What we are doing here now is participating in the perichoresis of the Trinity. Entering a divine dynamic where the problems of our world appear in a different light and respect for human dignity and freedom become luminous as the sun. Is this not what the world most needs right now?
Before he died, Bede said to his friend Cuthbert, “Help me sit facing the sanctuary. It will do me good to sit facing the place where I used to kneel and pray with my brethren.” He recalled his past experiences of prayer with his brothers and his participation in the perichoresis of the Trinity. His last words were a prayer to the Trinity, “Glory to You, O God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit”.