Trinity Sunday

         Trinity Sunday could be called the hinge of the Anglican Church Year.  It is the culmination of what began in Advent, and all the Sundays that follow are designated “Sundays after Trinity.”  Why, then, is this pivotal feast day the one on which many clergy would prefer not to have to preach? 
            Is it because the Trinity is not to be found explicitly in either testament of the Bible?  I suggest another possibility: the Trinity is a symbol, and a symbol is not preached; it is experienced, as Ignatius Loyola experienced it in the musical image of three keys on a clavichord. 
            Like all symbols, the Trinity is a unity of opposites: three in one and one in three.  It defies rational analysis.  Small wonder, then, that the preacher has an easier time with stories from the gospels or the Old Testament. 
            But the challenge of this Sunday is not to be evaded, for a religion’s survival depends on its fidelity to its symbols, and today the integrity of religious symbols is under threat, both by a false ecumenism and by political correctness. 
            Although the Trinity has ancient antecedents, it is to be found today only in Christianity; it has no place in the other two monotheistic faiths, Judaism and Islam, which, in fact, consider the Trinity incompatible with strict monotheism.  The 4th Surah of the Qur’an explicitly forbids belief in a Trinity. 
            If, out of deference to Jews and Muslims, we accept the status of a lowest common denominator monotheism. we will no longer be Christians.  Feminism also poses a challenge to the traditional formulation of the Trinity, for although there is a Father and a Son, there is no Mother, unless the Spirit is interpreted to be such.  Those offended by the masculine would replace Father, Son, and Holy Ghost with Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier.  But is this still the Christian Trinity? 
            If religious symbols are put forward as facts demanding universal acceptance, then they are an affront  to religions in which the symbol in question has no place.  But why should we wish to do this?  We do not expect all people to speak a common language.  Why should we expect them to embrace the same religious symbols? 
            I think the present plight of Anglicanism worldwide is the result, in part, at least, of our reluctance to be different, to hold the tension, to be neither Catholic nor Protestant, but both Catholic and Protestant, a union of opposites not unlike that of the Trinity itself. 
            If the symbol of Catholicism is the Pope, and the symbol of Protestantism is the Bible, what would our symbol be?  The symbol of Anglicanism, if we still have one, can only be the Book of Common Prayer.