Elastigirl

Craig, #52

Your comment inspired some thinking. Quite mysterious, this concept of 3 individuals-in-one. To try to understand this, we naturally attempt to do so with our minds. As a result, I think we over-intellectualize it, and reduce this totally “other” kind of Existence into nice & neat compartments… imposing such simplistic definition onto something so transcendent.

I was at a Children’s Discovery Museum yesterday, & my kids spent a good deal of time playing with bubbles. Several different activities. Creating a long, vertical bubble sheet that you could gently blow into and see it metmorphosize into a convex shape out the other side, and then morph back into a sheet shape. Liquid that was completely solid, but when you blew into it, myriad tiny bubbles exploded everywhere, enlivening the place. Tools to create enormous round bubbles as well as giant bubble tubes that you could swirl around youself, encasing you in a doughnut of shimmering, undulating miraculous material. My son caught a large bubble on his hand, then by somehow moving his hands together a second bubble emerged and he suddenly had a large bubble in each hand. The amazing variety of this substance comprised several forms: one solid liquid that could become a shape, 2 shapes, lots of shapes, which stretched, expanded, duplicated, moved slowly, moved quickly, vanished, reappeared…. and then returned to one liquid. Everyone, from the kids playing with bubbles to the parents watching were genuinely intrigued by the beauty and seeming miracle of these changing shapes — giggles, oohs and aahs from all, regardless of age, intellect, or soul condition. I think the intrigue is largely in the fact that the beauty is so elusive: the more a person seeks to touch it so as to see it more, feel it, experience it, enjoy it longer, or understand it, the quicker it goes “poof”. Gone.

This is certainly overstating the obvious and being long-winded about it. But I suppose this “bubbles word picture” is how I see this mysterious 3-in-oneness of God. The same substance, separating out into individual shapes, moving back into its oneness, moving back out again into its unique parts, an elusive phenomenon so other that you can’t catch so as to dissect the meaning out of it. Not something to seek to break down in the intellectual laboratory (whether to seek to understand it for what it is, or to see if one can wring more truth out of it than is really there in the 1st place). But something to marvel at because it just is.