The verb to build has many synonyms, including to construct and to fabricate. You can build a ship or an airplane, a bonfire or a house, but only the last of these structures qualifies as the gerund, the form of the verb that functions as a noun. To be a building, something must be constructed with a roof and walls and, according to some definitions, must also be meant for permanent use. A sukkah, a temporary structure used during the Jewish holiday Sukkot, or the Feast of Tabernacles, would not qualify. You might build a lean-to out of brush as you camp along the trail, but what you are building is not a building, since it is not permanent, and even if it was, it has but one wall, albeit one that is also a roof.
Is the Statue of Liberty, that sign of America’s past welcome to immigrants, a building? It is constructed, it is meant to be permanent, but it does not have a roof or walls as such. Sure, you can walk around inside, ascend to the torch, but you are inside of a sculpture that was constructed as a sculpture.
I ask the same question about one of Gustave Eiffel’s other great constructions, his eponymous tower in Paris. In fact, if you read Wikipedia’s article on the tower, you will notice that it does not refer to it as a building, though it compares it to an 81-story building. The Eiffel Tower is permanent, and there are roofs and walls on portions of the three platforms, yet it feels to me like the difference between a skeleton and a body. It is the logical framework, minus so much that protects and decorates.
Human logic can feel a little like the Eiffel Tower at times too, all wiring and framework, no decoration and protection. This is, for me, why reason alone is not enough for a fulfilling human life, why a reductionist approach that makes us nothing but wiring and framework is not enough for meaning.
I’d add scripture and tradition, as do our sisters and brothers in the Anglican tradition, plus experience, added by others. I’d go even further than this “scripture, experience, reason and tradition,†abbreviated SERT. I’d also add the transcendent, claimed by Emerson and Thoreau, but in truth the very definition of the divine, whether you name that divine God or serendipitous creativity or just leave a fill-in-the-blank for that undefinable more-ness that is everywhere around us if we can only bother to pay attention, that more-ness that calls us past the boundaries to places of discovery and adventure, for adventure is out there, not in here. Reason is not enough, will not suffice without art and without love, neither of which am I willing to reduce to wiring, to DNA and electricity. Art and love are not reasonable. Thank God.
The limitations of reason are best captured in the Liar’s Paradox, the sentence which reads “This sentence is false.†If you haven’t gone down this particular rabbit hole yet, spend a little time with it this afternoon, at least until your head starts hurting. Kurt Gödel would cite the Liar’s Paradox as an analogue to his incompleteness theorems, groundbreaking work right up there with his best friend Albert’s work on relativity. Incompleteness and relativity joined Heisenberg’s uncertainty, Tarski’s undefinability, and Schrödinger’s infamous cat in showing us the limits of what can be known, what can be certain, what can be defined.
I love this stuff. I totally do not understand this stuff. But it makes me feel like there is room for all that transcendent love and art stuff because these most brilliants of minds found an equation that turns back on itself. It makes me feel like there is room left for God, and even that most peculiar of Christian concepts, the Trinity.
Trinitarian theology originates in some pretty basic questions. What does Jesus mean when he says if you have seen him, you have seen the Father? What exactly is the Holy Spirit? Is it the same as the Spirit of God that is active in the Hebrew scriptures? People went to the mat, and sometimes to the grave, over the exact operation of the Trinity. Does the Spirit proceed from the Father, as the Orthodox believe, or from the Father and the Son, Filioque in Latin, and one of the primary causes of the Great Schism that tore the thousand year old church in two, the first of many?
Monotheism was hard won, sometimes raging prophets run out of town and sometimes religious reformers with the blessing of those in power. It was Elijah and violence and it was Elijah hiding in a cave. The Hebrew people moved from polytheism, belief in many gods, to an intermediary step, henotheism, belief in many gods but worship of only one, then all the way to an ethical monotheism, the belief that there never had been more than one God.
The claims of Jesus as reported in the gospel, the idea of incarnation, this man who identifies himself as a presence of God and yet makes clear that he is separate from God, is a sin, is dynamite in the basement of monotheism, threatening to bring the whole house down. It is blasphemy to the Temple establishment and to any God-fearing Jew of that age. Islam, the last of the great monotheisms, even has a word, shirq, for idolatry or polytheism by a Muslim, worship or attribution of divinity to anything except the singular God who they name Allah.
The latest translation of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s summa, titled in English “Christian Faith,†is over a thousand pages long, and yet the Trinity is so beyond reason that the great early 19th century theologian who wrote hundreds of pages on how Jesus is Christ only devotes eighteen to the topic of Trinity.
For me, God, to be God, must be beyond human understanding, which works for me, for there is so much I do not understand. The Trinity is strange and not logical, but the Liar’s paradox reminds us that even the framework of human logic has limitations, and is often lacking in beauty. In fact, I find beauty in the idea that God is not one, is not an “I,†is not singular, but is somehow a “we,†albeit a “we†that is united. This is not a Spirit pulling for one nation and Jesus for another and God hurling down thunderbolts. Embracing Trinity does not mean the arbitrary and capricious chaos of the Greek gods.
But a God that is a “we†is a God that is oriented toward relationship, that maybe doesn’t create in order to be worshiped but that creates as an expression of a dynamic and powerful love in action. Maybe the something instead of nothing is an outflowing of holy love, an overflow of holy love. Maybe we are because of divine surplus.
Schleiermacher gives us page after page trying to explain the attributes of God, words like omnipotent which means all-powerful, but then gives us page after page explaining that while any individual attribute might describe some aspect of God, one cannot reverse the formula, one cannot reduce God to any particular attribute like the term omnipotent. And after building this entire framework, a structure as intricate and glorious as a Parisian tower, he tears it down, saying that there is one word that completely captures the identity of God, and that word is love.
God is love and the greatest commandment is love and the Sh’ma Yisrael commands love as does the Oral Torah of Rabbi Jesus who widens that circle of radical and selfless love to encompass not just God, not just immediate family, not just the tribe of Judah, but everyone, Syro-Phoenecians and members of a Centurion’s household and those who are killing you. They shall know you by your love, Jesus tells his followers as he prepares for a fatal confrontation with the authorities. “Forgive them, Father. They know not what they do.†That is love.
If love is so central to the Judea-Christian trajectory, why, I wonder, do we reduce it to empty words as formulaic as any Hallmark card? Sure love can be an infant in the arms of a parent, and scripture gives us that image for the relationship between Yahweh and the Hebrew people, but we also have hundreds of pages when that love is demanding and hard. Love is demanding and hard, and I have it on good authority that it often looks less like a Hallmark card and more like Wrestlemania, even with decades of practice. Sure, things may settle down, edges may get worn, but if it is alive, it is going to be more than a rigid and logical framework. What is alive changes and takes and gives.
Love is the ultimate Liar’s paradox in which we lose ourselves and find out who we really are.
“I love my church. I love my community. I love this country. I love the Red Sox.†Well, I don’t love the Red Sox, though I’ll begrudgingly admit that they earned the title of the greatest team of the last decade.
We have turned love into something it isn’t. You aren’t called to sacrifice anything for the Red Sox, and even during those long decades between championships, what did it really cost you. Love costs. If there is no sacrifice, the love isn’t real.
Real love is up in the middle of the night, a near-zombie trying to stay awake at work and waiting until that wee one starts sleeping through the night. It is barely keeping down your own vomit as you clean vomit. Sure it is a casserole at a potluck, but sometimes it is also a foxhole in the desert, and sometimes it is teargas and dogs. It is doing battle with the Pharaoh, and it is doing battle with J. Edgar Hoover, all in the name of liberation.
The Roman church has finally recognized Oscar Romero for what he was and remains to the faithful, a saint and martyr, and it was he that spoke of the “violence of love,†for the move to love is to violently tear open our hearts, to sweep out the moneychangers that have set up shop and built stalls in our heart. It is to make room for something new. We don’t know who that baby will grow up to be, but we know we must make space for this new life, and that is what happens with our hearts, with love, making space for not-us.
Love is the X in every single equation and it is never logical. It is the ultimate spiritual practice, as mysterious as Trinity, as we are “me†and “we†at the same time, as we love that mystery we name as God above all things, this ground of our very being itself, as we love life, for what better answer to the question God puts before us than to embrace all that is living.
Love looks like a man who touches the unclean. It looks like a man who loves God enough to learn scripture, to apply it to his own life, to explain it to Sadducees and Scribes. It looks like a man so troubled by the sorrow, brokenness and evil that he witnesses in the world that he is willing to speak the truth of love, demanding and sacrificial love, even when it might mean his life. It is a man with the courage to say to his closest friends, “This is going to be really hard and scary,†and have them believe, for the light in his eyes is the light of love.
Logic did not take him to Jerusalem. Logic did not make him engage in acts of dramatic disruption and civil disobedience in the Temple. It was not logic that struck down the guards and turned a tomb into a triumph. It was explosive love.
If an overflow of divine love is why is instead of isn’t, Jesus was that divine love experienced in a way we could understand, and it is terrifying and amazing and emotional. “I am pouring my guts out for you here! This is my body. This is my blood.â€
Love, divine love, real human love, is not cold and hard logic standing and unmoving. It is not sappy and saccharine. It is sweat and time invested and aching backs and sleepless nights and a fight or two along the way. It is facing hate and knowing that love wins.
It is facing hate and believing that love wins.
Build all the towers you want, thousands of pages of Neoplatonic logic, attempts to explain or deny Trinity. Love does not require shelves and shelves of books. Unto you a savior is born. He is not here. He is risen.
Faith, hope, and love endure. And the greatest of these is love.
Amen.