From: Carla Mae Streeter, OP\r\n
To: The Colorado Springs Cohort\r\n
Aquinas Institute of Theology\r\n
Master of Arts in Pastoral Ministry Program\r\n
Dear All of you,\r\n
As you proceed along in your Integrative Seminar, I send just a few thoughts along to recap our journey into the course dealing with where you as Christians and as ministers are with God. The course called The Doctrine of God: One and Triune, I hope, was a type of centering experience for you as it always is for me. The history part of the course was heavy stuff, and you bravely plunged into it because you believed you had to have some idea of why are where we are with this belief.\r\n
The abstract distance many Christians feel in relation to this doctrine is due, we learned, to the fact that up to now we haven’t gone back behind the formulation. So we went back, you and I, and made some rather remarkable discoveries. We learned that we know next to nothing about the Triunity of God except for Jesus cluing us in on it. We learned that Jesus himself is the key to knowing God – and without him we have a pretty good chance of creating some god-awful image in our own likeness. We learned that keeping our eyes on his sacred humanity, especially on the cross, shows us the Father and the Spirit in a way we will never grasp through abstract theorizing. We learned that God is one, and when we call God “Father” we refer to the most hidden, mysterious aspect of God. When we call God “Son” we mean that same God now self-expressing in a God-Word, and it is this Word or son who married our humble humanness. When we refer to the “Spirit” we mean the dynamic self-gift of that same God. The bottom line is that God is one – in a threeness that is totally unified.\r\n
If Jesus in his human union with us is the key to this mystery, then our humanness is key to it too. Jesus is the image of the invisible God, Paul tells us. We reflected on the fact that we are a mystery to ourselves in many ways; we express ourselves, and we act out of who we are. We considered the fact that on the cross Jesus reveals the Triune Mystery best: his Hidden Abba supporting him even in deepest darkness, his very wounds speaking when his voice was stilled, and his body pouring out its life-blood in a self-giving that released the Spirit upon the world. The Christ then reveals who God is to us through his sacred humanity, and invites us to come to know this God by reverencing our own.\r\n
We used the humble image Eastern Orthodoxy give us as an analogy of all this – the burning candle. The flame is made known to us by the light we are able to see, and the heat of the flame is one with the flame itself and its light. You wrestled with various other images that might express this great mystery to help others reclaim it in their lives. Recall them. Reclaim them as you complete your formal studies. It is from this Mystery that it all begins – and ends.\r\n
Carla Mae Streeter, OP
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