“Veiled in flesh the Godhead see, hail the incarnate Deity …”

—Charles Wesley

On the surface, my last essay was a vacation narrative. Metaphorically, it was a picture (albeit inadequate) of what it is like to diligently seek after Holy God and to try to know him. Every foray, however purposeful and strenuous it seems to us, is as nothing. It’s no better than examining a pebble that has fallen off a mountain that stands in a vast range of mountains that span the length of a continent in the middle of a planet that hangs in a solar system in a galaxy of numberless galaxies in all of Space. And then, there is another pebble … and another. It is exhilarating and exhausting and dangerous and never ending. It is impossible.

I don’t come to this subject as a theologian. In fact, I probably shouldn’t have come to it all as I have written and thrown out, written and thrown out, three times over and decided to share only one real conclusion with you. Besides, two thousand words is a pittance and I’m very likely to make a fool of myself whether with two thousand or twenty thousand. I lack letters and periods behind my name and the years of formal education they would indicate. But I have loved God for thirty-eight years and I love to try to think about God … who he is and what he is like … a subject higher and deeper than my frail humanity will allow. Perhaps it is this frailness or a shaky spiritual formation (if one could call it that) that has put emphasis on separating Father, Son and Spirit and categorizing the qualities of each rather than on the Godhead’s divine communion and indivisible proceeding.

I can’t really blame my background or myself. I’ve come to the conclusion that, like trying to explore every square inch of the great and vast and dangerous American West (see Part One) in one vacation or in many vacations over a whole lifetime, the Godhead is not to be discerned or explained by one mind or by the cumulative mind of man, in one moment or in all the moments of time and history. Every time we open our mouths to speak on it or put pen to paper to write about it, no matter the inspiration God breathes into us, we will leave something out. We cannot describe the fullness and mystery and speech-defying indivisibility of the Godhead in a few succinct sentences. We are left to dribble it out on page after page of Scripture and in spiritual writings and hymns and psalms and in creations of art and expressions of love and acts of compassion and mercy and goodness over lifetimes and generations and centuries and eons of history. And still it is not enough.

After all, we can only look at one pebble at a time. As finite beings with finite understandings and finite tools for communicating, we stop well short of complete understanding, let alone expression. It’s a problem that may be responsible for most of the ruckus in the history of the Church. Whatever our brothers fail to perceive or express (in our opinion) is cause for us to pounce, or for them to pounce where we fail.

Continue reading “Thoughts on the Godhead — Part Two”

“There is something exceedingly improving to the mind in a contemplation of the Divinity. It is a subject so vast, that all our thoughts are lost in its immensity; so deep, that our pride is drowned in its infinity … nothing will so magnify the whole soul of man … Then go, plunge yourself in the Godhead’s deepest sea …”—J.I. Packer

[The following story was originally intended as a brief intro, but is now expanded to be part one. If you don’t mind being taken for ride out West, we’ll get to spiritualizing in part two this afternoon.]

A few years ago, when our oldest daughter was newly married, we planned a family vacation and, for the first time, included someone who wasn’t born in … our son-in-law. The prospect put me under intense pressure. My husband had decided where we were going. The West had always been our happy place and we tried to get there every few years. Our own kids knew what to expect … mountains, big skies, simplicity and communing with nature. But suddenly I was faced with entertaining a new member, one whose biological family was accustomed to beach vacations and good restaurants. I have nothing against beaches and good restaurants, but our modi operandi are grueling road trips, meals out of the cooler and digs off the beaten path.

I went to work diligently planning the route, the stops, the accommodations and day trips in every direction from the cabin where we would stay. We would cram as much West into a week as we could and try to make sure our son-in-law loved it as much as we did by the time it was over.

On the way out, we made visits to several historic sites including the windswept, rattlesnake-infested hills where Custer made his last stand at the Battle of Little Big Horn. We met bison too close for comfort at Custer State Park and peered at the giant granite faces carved by dynamite into the side of Mount Rushmore. We locked our keys in the car in the Badlands and worried about the prospect of being eaten by wolves if a ranger didn’t show up to break into our car before sundown. He did.

Our stay in a cabin in Red Lodge, Montana was not without its perils either. We woke up to drink coffee on the back porch and listen to the sounds of creek waters crashing over its rock-strewn bed thirty yards away and noticed the yard moving. It was alive with dozens of snakes … apparently one price of admission to God’s country.

Later that morning, we encountered another treacherous consequence to exploration of the still Wild West when we started our trip over the scenic Bear Tooth Pass to Yellowstone Park. A young couple sat stunned and bloody at the side of the road with a dead deer half in and half out their shattered windshield. We stopped to offer help, but a sheriff arrived at the same time and waved us on. The switchbacks proved too much for my eldest daughter who was severely stricken with altitude sickness. We drove with the windows down despite the frigid air in the upper climes. My son-in-law faithfully deposited the up-chuck bags in bear-proof trash containers at every stop until the sickness wore off and we could finally have some fun. Opting to save Yellowstone for another day as we’d gotten off to a slow start, we veered off the Bear Tooth to a ranger station and asked for a map and guide to a family friendly hike. We worried mostly about bears, but encountered a moose instead. Moose are grumpy and dangerous too, so we gave it a wide berth and lost thirty minutes just waiting for it to finish grazing and move a safe distance from where we needed to pass. The older kids went farther up the trail to find a lake and my husband and I decided to head back to the car with our young daughter. She wasn’t up to the lengthy hike. Then we realized we’d left one of our two-way radios in a boulder field half a mile back. What to do? What to do? I left the two of them and ran back while they continued down the trail. Being alone gave me the creeps. I felt watched, whether by that moose or mountain lions or bears. I prayed the whole way and though I was afraid, I was also hyper conscious of being fully upon that Montana mountainside. I was experiencing the air, the pines, the rocks and the creatures I had seen and sensed around me. I could have read about it in a book, but here I was rewarded with a joy I’d driven seventeen hundred purposeful miles to find.

Fortunately, God protected us in his beautiful creation from our own ignorance and humanity that day and the days to follow.

Continue reading “Thoughts on the Godhead — Part One”