THE
THREE IN ONE
BIG QUESTIONS ABOUT GOD
by Shane Dwyer
by Felicity de Fombelle
My mother once told me that she began to learn about the Catholic faith when I started asking questions about it. Rather than try to give me simplistic answers to complex questions, she went and tried to find the answer. My questions became part of her journey of discovery.
OF FAITH
So here’s a question for you: What are those Catholics doing when they make the sign of the cross? What’s so special about ‘in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit’? Sometimes they do it so quickly it looks like they’re swatting flies! What’s it all about?
“If God is so good and powerful, why is there suffering and why is life sometimes so hard?” It is good to discuss these big questions, which is why the Archdiocese has started the ‘Saturday Spirituality Seminars’. I recently attended the first, along with 40 others, and found it really absorbing. The Archdiocesan Coordinator of Faith Formation Shane Dwyer is the presenter and he is great. You can’t help but be drawn in as the discussions are so relevant to our daily lives and are matters that we all grapple with. So, in terms of why God allows suffering, one of Shane’s comments was: “There is more to what God wants for us than just giving us a nice life, and often we misunderstand that.”
To have any hope of understanding it, we have to understand that Catholics (and Christians in general) have a very specific view of God. We believe that there is one God, and that God has revealed himself to be Three Persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. On the surface of it, this is a bit mad. How can we say that God is One and God is Three? Once somebody tried to explain it to me, and I pass it on to you for what it is worth. He said, “take any person as an example. If you are woman chances are you are somebody’s daughter, somebody’s wife, somebody’s mother, somebody’s friend, and so on. If you’re a man you may be somebody’s son, somebody’s father, somebody’s brother, and so on. You get the idea. You’re one person, but you’re many things depending on who’s looking at (or relating to) you”. While saying God is Three Persons is a little bit more complicated than that, the example begins to help us see that it is possible to be one thing and many things at the same time. However, the fact is that all our attempts to explain the Trinity fall short. Personally, I find this very reassuring. God is beyond human comprehension. The Trinity is not a helpful human explanation of what God is like. It is not something we would make up because, from our point of view, it doesn’t make sense. The only reason we believe God is Trinity is because God has told us that this is who he is. We believe in a God who defies our human comprehension, and anyone who claims to have understood God and to have sorted him out is deceived. We do not sort God out: God sorts us out.
He added: “You can’t love your wife just for what she does for you. You love her for who she is. It’s the same with God. He wants us to love him in spite of what he is doing, not because of it. The challenge is to say, ‘I don’t know what you’re doing God, or why, but I believe in you anyway’.” Toni Dickins, 25, said she would definitely recommend the two-hour seminars to others. “I grew up in a Catholic family but we never really discussed our faith, so I want to understand it better,” Toni said. “I haven’t always been so devoted and being a Catholic does make your life more complicated, but also more fulfilling.” Discussing the theme “Who is God?” Shane stressed that God was not an easy answer to anything.
So when your child comes home from school oneday and asks what the sign of the cross is all about, what will you say?
“We want a God we can control, who will do things for us when we ask and make no demands,” he went on. “It’s like we have a contract with God. I do my bit and God does his. But God doesn’t operate that way. It is not us who shapes God. It is God who shapes us.”
*Shane is Archdiocesan Coordinator, Faith Formation & Spirituality. This is his fifth column about Catholic faith.
* The next seminar will be on April 21. To register, phone 6163 4336.
Your Family, Your Faith is proudly supported by the Australian Catholic University
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