Here we are again – at Christmas time. Bliss! A holiday. A time to reflect on what is important. And what is more important, more important than virtually anything else, is what we believe. Why? Because what we believe affects all the outcomes of our life. Famously James Allen cited the Bible and virtually launched the Personal Development movement when he said at the beginning of the Twentieth Century: ‘As a man thinketh, so is he’. Thinking here means believing.
I belong to religious group of people called Quakers, The Society of Friends. God bless them all, but there are some who seem to think – to believe – what many secular people believe: that belief is unimportant, and it is what you do that counts. As long as we do good, so their thinking goes, then all is well: we do not need creeds, especially religious ones, to be good people. In one obvious way it’s a sad position for a Quaker to adopt, since why be part of a religion at all if that were the case: we can do good as the secular society of friends! But it is much more misguided than that.
What is most misguided is the underlying assumption that there is such a position or indeed such a human being who is without beliefs, or without their own personal creed(s). People who claim that they dislike creeds are in the act of proclamation creating their own creed! The word creed itself comes from the Latin ‘credo’ and means, I believe. We all believe something, and this something can always be stated as a proposition; however, some people refuse to admit that even to themselves. They seem to want to congratulate themselves with moral brownie points for being ‘free’ of the constriction of beliefs, as this this were a freedom. Indeed, the reverse is true: the person who acts under the delusion that they have no beliefs and no creed is some acting under a subconscious constraint the more damaging because it is invisible to their conscious mind.
With that in mind then we can return to Christmas and the incarnation: the notion that is offensive to so many people that God became human and a divine child. Do we believe that? Many do and many regard it as preposterous, although for myself I take the view that anything that has endured – like the Pyramids – needs to be treated with massive respect before we dismiss it as an historical curiosity. But let’s lay aside the incarnation for a moment, for Christianity has an even more momentous and awkward belief to explain or justify. One that has caused even more division and acrimony than the ‘sonship’ of Jesus Christ: namely, the Trinity itself, which is not even mentioned as a concept in the Bible, so how can this be a valid belief as opposed to some priestly jiggery-pokery designed to befuddle the masses?
Again, I was at a point of dismissing this idea, this belief myself for a while, but one thing held me back: the strange properties of nature which consistently seem to reveal a three-in-one quality. For examples, time, which is past, present and future; space, which is length, height and breadth; matter, which is solid, liquid and gaseous; and beyond this arcane and yet essential concepts like ‘narrative’, which is beginning, middle and end, and which in some profound way is how we get to understand anything – through narrative, through story. So, whilst God cannot be explained, what metaphor best depicts this trinity and enables one to grasp something of its power?
For me as I wrestled with this concept the best metaphor that approximates to it is the human mind itself. God the Father, the first person of the Trinity, is LIKE our own thoughts: forever invisible to others. People cannot read our thoughts and we cannot read theirs; they are, as it were, encased or enclosed in some sort of inaccessible light. I say light because thoughts enable us to ‘see’. But, should the thought choose to reveal itself, then it does so via the word: we speak, and lo! Our thoughts are manifested. Here, however, we need to bear in mind two things: the thought precedes the word, and yet the thought and the word are inseparable. There is no sense in which a word is an independent creation of the thought (of course, bearing in mind that humans lie, whereas here we are talking of a perfect correspondence between the ‘thought’ of God and the ‘word’ of God); they are ‘one’ but they are distinct.
And so to the third person of the Trinity, which in this model becomes the enaction of the thought/word. If we see someone about to cross the road and we yell, ‘Stop’, there is some possibility that that is exactly what they will do. Indeed, in our every day and mundane lives we speak to and with people and we either follow their direction or advice or they follow ours, or both. The words we speak have a power to move reality. The Holy Spirit, then, is the energising agent that effects the consequence of the spoken word. Again, just as the word follows from the thought, so too the action follows the expression of the word: it is not different from it, but a natural continuation of it, and so the three are all ‘one’ in some essential sense.
If we were perfect human beings, then our thoughts would correspond with our words, and our actions would follow suit. This in business language is what we call having integrity! The whole of our history is about the struggle to find consistency and truth in other human beings and when we can find it, we have a role model. Nelson Mandela died recently. He said he’d stand for President and then step down after five years. What did he do? He stepped down – remarkably for an African president! – after five years, and we see his consistency and we think: wow! What a man, what a person!
Thus, we are at Christmas – let’s enjoy it and do good. But let’s not forget the Christ child and who he is – who we believe he is. And let’s remember, what we believe has huge implications for our own future and who we are.
Happy Christmas to my readers!
The Mapping Motivation Series 