The past few days have not only brought glorious sunshine, but also marked two key festivals in the life of churches everywhere – Pentecost, and Trinity Sunday. These two festivals, even though they are at the core of the Christian faith, tend to pass by most of the general public.

For good reason. They concern, after all, the idea that God is both one and three at the same time. Which is decidedly odd. After all, even a 5 year old can tell you that you can’t have one thing that is three things at the same time.

Which must mean that we Christians are either especially gullible, or particularly bad at maths. Now, in my case the latter might be true – I only barely scraped through the equivalent of a Maths A-level in high school. But we are not gullible. What lies behind our talk of Trinity is really the realisation that there is no language for speaking about God, no way of making sense of God. After all, God is not a person in any way we understand “person”. God doesn’t even exist in the way we do, bound inside time and space. Whoever God is, God is utterly beyond us.

And that might be a good thing. We live in a moment where many of the world’s leaders are terribly convinced that they possess the truth, and are willing to do unimaginable harm in defence of that truth. There is no point in opposing such terrible certainty with a different certainty – that is how wars start.

But what if we admitted again, even if only quietly to ourselves, that the world is so much more and so much more mysterious than we can imagine? And what if this mystery is really held and anchored in the mystery of God’s love for us? That might be worth celebrating. Even with its odd maths.

Erik Peeters

Wakefield Cathedral