a triune God with a twist
26 Oct 2025last night on our 3rd anniversary date, david and i were having a lovely conversation about spirituality spurred by our friend and teacher/mentor, gibrán. right before dinner, we got appetizers with him and he was sharing at one point in the convo about how core spirituality was in his relationship with tuesday (our love).
as david and i were reflecting on the role of spirituality in our relationship, i was reminded of a (the?) way i learned about the role of God in christian relationships. it went something like this:
every christian relationship is a love triangle: a man, a woman, and God.
the way a couple grows closer together is by each person moving towards God and, as a consequence, getting closer to the other person. and it was danger zone if the humans tried to seek each other instead of seeking God because that would lead to the humans idolizing each other and since humans aren’t perfect (and God is), that would lead to eventual destruction of the relationship and maybe worse…
during our convo, i realized why that framework no longer worked for me (beyond the obvious heteronormative part that never worked for me): it presents God as outside of the humans. it takes as an assumption that the way to move towards God is to not prioritize orienting to the other human.
and as i had that realization, something started to open up in my mind. i remembered one thing that does still work for me about understandings of God from christianity which was that God IS relationship. God in christianity is seen as three separate entities (the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit) who are in relationship with each other and simultaneously also the same Being. God is three pieces that constitute one whole. we sometimes used the words triune or triumverate to describe this phenomenon.
now, that is a wild thing to digest but leaving that digestion aside, i do really still vibe with the idea that God can be found in and sometimes can actually BE relationship(s).
another part that doesn’t work for me anymore of the earlier love triangle framework is that it doesn’t acknowledge the God in myself or the God in my partner. i really do understand my pursuit of the Holy is as feasible by diving deeply into myself as it is diving deeply into another as it is trying to pursue the Holy as its own thing.
the thing that unlocked for me (which you might have already caught on to) was that if God could be equally pursued in me, in another, and in God directly, that is a funny back door way of getting to the conclusion that God is triune.
:o
i was shocked as it started to tumble around in my mind.
and honestly, i have no idea what to do, if anything, with that thought. for now, i’m just gonna leave it over here and see what happens with it, either in my mind or for anyone else reading this…
words / writing / post-processing
447w / 21min / 3min