Trinity Sunday celebrates the Christian doctrine of the three Persons of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It is a piece of theology that doesn´t appear anywhere in the Bible and was fought over bitterly in the early Christian centuries. And even now is not easy for worshippers to hold it all in our minds. Instead we tend to slip into following that constituent part of God that most closely suits our own particular breed of Christianity.

So, there are the ‘Fatherists’, who’s God is almighty, if distant and at times aloof. They love their religion formal, they like the rules and the structures, they like to know where they are and to know where God is – in his heaven…away from everyday life. They like to look up to him and to look forward to a very “other-world” where he is ruler and Lord.

And then there are the ‘Sonists’…and their religion is very different. Their God is more a sort of hero figure…..not the distant Father, but the great miracle worker, the populist leader, the storyteller. Their theological champions always remind us of the importance of getting back to the “real” Jesus.

And then there are the ‘Holy Spiritists’, who look neither to the great God figure in the sky…nor to the historical Jesus…but to their own feelings and experiences of every moment of their lives. For their God is entirely imminent - here and now – and any theology, structure, or for that matter, historical narrative, is only ever a guide to experiencing God in the present moment all the more fully.

But the theology of the Trinity brings it all together – that God is one substance, though three persons. God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit…one God, with three distinct ways in which we can know him, three ways of being God for us. Whoever partakes of one, partakes of all three.

The picture shows a mosiac of the Trinity, from The Trinity Dome at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington DC.