I pretty much stopped believing in the Trinity a long time ago—at least in the traditional sense—where God is a white-haired old man who with his son Jesus and the Holy Ghost make up the Godhead.

I can understand the discomfort Jews and Muslims have with it all. It didn’t make sense to second-century Jews and later to eighth-century followers of Mohammed. It didn’t make sense to the Deists who founded our country and whose spirituality was nourished by the 18th-century enlightenment—despite the wishes of modern-day revisionist Christian fundamentalists who claim the founders were something different.

It doesn’t make sense in postmodernity, in the world of physical science and human psychology. It doesn’t jibe with our dualistic, pluralistic and materialistic mindsets. It doesn’t make sense to the Unitarians who worship up the street from Albuquerque (N.M.) Mennonite Church. It doesn’t make sense to today’s create your own religion, post-Christian, post-whatever sensibilities either.

But maybe that’s not the purpose of it all anyway.

Just down the block and around the corner from the Taos casita I stayed in one month last year is a streetside holy place. It has little altars and memorials scattered among the trees and bushes. Fading signs and mottos are strung from low-hanging branches. Candles, faded flowers, statues, rock circles and other artifacts remind visitors that this unassuming empty lot is indeed a sacred space dedicated to the honor of the Holy Trinity.

I passed “Holy Trinity Park” on my daily morning and evening walks and felt within the rhythm of my breathing, my heartbeats and my footsteps the challenge that maybe a three-dimensional approach to understanding the nature of God actually does make some sense. Perhaps our experience of the holy can be known in three basic levels.

When I was a kid, my mom suggested one way to comprehend the Trinity was to consider the way we perceive the properties of water, which we can recognize in different forms: as a frozen solid, as liquid and as vapor—it’s still all water. Our spiritual ancestors simply used the realities and worldviews they had access to describe the almost indescribable. If I insist on using a literalist understanding of their reality, I’m missing an awesome and wondrous perspective.

Creator (the solid ground of our being)

Something made us—and the universe. Something cannot come from nothing. It is both other—beyond us—and within us. We may recognize this as the ground of our being or the unified field. Sometimes we call it holy—so holy in fact the Hebrews could only ascribe consonants to the word used to describe this “most high,” YHWH. No wonder they took offense at Jesus’ sense of familiarity with the Creator. Abba? Daddy God? Yet there is a longing for a reconnection with the mind that created us that we humans have intuitively understood since the dawn of consciousness, when we became aware of our individuality, of our separateness. It’s called religion (“religar” in Latin means to reconnect). We are part of something wonderful and awesome that reaches back beyond the Big Bang or whatever we imagine the beginning of our reality to be. We are part of creation, too. Perhaps our essential task in life is to return, to draw near and remain under the protective wings, as it were, of our Creator. St. Augustine understood this impulse with his famous confession: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

Child/man (washed in the flow of the Jordan)

In the person of Jesus we at the very least have an archtype that allows the Creator to draw near. We only know this as we “do” the following of Jesus. I understand this as a kind of kinesthetic spirituality. We only “get it” when we move (as he did). No matter what one thinks about Jesus or what powers we ascribe to him, there is an undeniable connection (for me at least) that he gives me to what lies “beyond.” There will always be arguments about the nature of Jesus/Christ—from prophet to savior, to messiah, to cosmic connection and numerous other possibilities in between. It may not really matter what we believe. I think it matters more in whom we trust. And if we really trust in what Jesus said and who he is; if we simply allow him to carry us, we are more able to make contact with the primordial ground of all that is. It is so much greater than the structural paradigms of Christianity (Christendom) we’ve created through the centuries.

So much of what we (the church) have built over the past two millennia is a construct that actually denies the one Jesus represents and the truly radical and grace-filled life we have been invited into. Once the paradigms have been shattered, Jesus can actually become a (hu)man/savior for our age.

Spirit/wind/baruch (the vapor of energy)

The life force that ties it all together, that gives breath, that is essentially present in everything, I usually call Spirit. For me it is creativity pure and simple. It is unity. It is love. It is the power that combines 6 billion-year-old molecules or stardust into cells, muscles, skin, teeth, senses and intelligence to make us human, and to create so many other creatures and nature in general, no matter the process. Joseph Rael is a Picuras Pueblo holy man who teaches about the animated universe or the reality of vibration/life within everything—of every material aspect in the universe. It’s not unlike the emerging chaos theory concept in physics that recognizes disorder, spontaneity and movement as a vital part of the creative force.

And it’s true, scientifically, that everything we see contains movement of some sort, from sub-atomic particles rotating around a nucleus to the internal composition of the granite rocks and magnum rumbling beneath our feet to the billions of stars streaming through the universe. Everything moves. Everything is imbued with spirit. All creation is animated.

So we are all part of this incredible creation, and despite our physical demise, we will return to dust. We’ll continue on in some form as part of the mountains, the skies, the stars—the universe—until we’re drawn back into the arms of our creator in some fantastic future dimension. Everything is holy, including our whole selves, everything seen and unseen, what is tangible and what cannot be known or touched. It is an unfathomably deep mystery. I can only weep when I think about it.

It all comes down to movement. So maybe I can take the Holy Trinity and walk it out. Maybe I can feel the connections and reality of a three-dimensional perspective as I listen to the simple sound of my footsteps in the silence of the starry night.
Padda pum, padda pum, padda pum.

Someday I may even be willing to talk to a Unitarian about it.

Ken Gingerich is a member of Albuquerque (N.M.) Mennonite Church.