Trinity

Note: Tom Ehrich is an Episcopal priest in Durham, North Carolina, who writes a daily meditation series On a Journey. His reflections are timely and challenging. Here I believe he points to the importance of self-differentiation for pilgrims on the journey of faith.

By Tom Ehrich

At the awards ceremony for academic achievement at my son's high school, I saved a seat for my son but soon noticed that few students were sitting with their parents.

Kids sat with kids, and parents sat wherever they could. And that, in my opinion, is the way it should be. Even though self-differentiation and seeking independence begin early in a child's life, the process accelerates like a race car during adolescence.

When children don't dare this process or hovering parents don't allow it for fear of losing their primary "project" in life, a difficult adulthood lies ahead. Ask any spouse who has devoted early marriage to helping a partner leave childhood. Or any employer who deals with endless adolescence on the job.

Independence seems to involve three dimensions: physical separation, emotional autonomy, and identity clarification. That is, the child no longer walks alongside the parent, the child no longer derives all emotional support and clues from the parent, and the child's unique identity blossoms.

In time, children seem to work their way back to the values, customs and world-awareness that they received from their parents. "The apple," as they say, "never falls far from the tree." But that process cannot be compelled or hastened. There can be long periods when children and parents are strangers to each other.

Now picture Jesus and God, child and parent. Trinitarian doctrine has much to say about their identity, but I find it unhelpful. It owes too much to Greek philosophy -- forms and natures -- and has too little awareness of life on "ground level." It also tends to concern power, not identity.

Like any self-differentiating person, Jesus set about establishing his own identity. He didn't hesitate to rewrite some inherited traditions and to speak in a language quite distinct from Torah. He went where he went and did what he did. While he occasionally "called home," as it were, he seems to have made his own decisions. He wasn't a puppet.

And yet he told people that when they saw him, they saw God. He was a living presence of God, just as I am a living presence of my parents. When someone hears my humor, they hear the jokes my father told. When they experience my values or my impatience, they experience my parents. I am different, and yet I am much like them.

I think this is what Jesus was saying about himself, God and the Spirit who would come in time. We can know Jesus and thereby know God, or we can feel God's presence and name it Jesus, or we can turn to an ineffable Spirit and witness what is beyond our sight.