Signs of God
This blog entry is in the form of a book report: I have recently completed Peter Leithart’s, Traces of the Trinity: Signs of God in Creation and Human Experience and I commend it to you.
Leithart thinks about his experience of a number of things such as language, time, music, and romantic relationships. What he sees is what he calls ‘mutual penetration’ or ‘mutual indwelling.’ (Here he reminds me of the Anglo-Catholic novelist Charles Williams, who is worth looking up). When you consider things deeply, the elements or persons are neither indivisibly one, nor are they separate and isolated. The mother and the fetus - they are separate and yet their lives are intertwined. Lovers come to see their life as inter-penetrated, and this is just what the marriage service affirms. The past is in our present in our memories, and you cannot separate one from another. Music is everywhere in us, and we feel our lives for a moment inside the music. Notes occupy the same ‘space’ at once in a chord. A story contains the world it tells about, but the world has stories in it. Leithart says each is like a Mobius strip where two things are interfolded into each other. We parents are not our children, but heaven knows we indwell their struggles. Each of these things is ‘within you and without you’, all at the same time. This state of affairs is not a misunderstanding to be ironed out, but a mystery to be noticed and pondered.
Leithart goes on to say that each of these intimate mysteries of our lives trace, a whisper, a reminder of the One who created them all, who is Father, Son, and Spirit, three and one, indwelling each other is a sense far fuller than we can experience in these human dimensions.
But the author is not naïve. He is not saying that you could just look at parents and children, or lovers, or time, or music, and figure out that there is a God who is one and three! The revelation has to come first. But once you know of it, then the complexity and mystery of the world make better sense. God leaves, as it were, traces of His nature in His creation. Read this book, and the complex, both/and-ness of the world is illumined, and along the way our faith is strengthened as well.
GRS+
