It Takes a Trinity: Human Bentness, Lenten Communion, and Grace that Meets Us Early—Timothy Jones
By Timothy Jones
As the saying goes, there was more to the picture than just the wall behind it. Even a little drama.
In the photo I’m smiling, pushing myself up from my tummy on my baby-fat laden forearms. Someone off-camera—Mom or Dad, maybe a very enthusiastic stranger—has caught my attention. My parents kept the tarnished gold-framed picture on their dresser throughout my childhood. You can tell that I was loving the attention, staring out at the world with an infant’s inquisitive eyes, hoping for a face to connect with. I’m showing a capacity for happy affection.
Maybe you, too, look at your baby photos and notice something.
Sometimes, with years of reflection, you see more than you did at first. In my imagination, I see how the camera could also have captured the next moment, my smile turned into a quivering lip as I realized I was in a strange place, taken from my mother’s arms. Or maybe normal sibling stuff— pouting because I had to share attention with a brother standing in the background. And now, too late to check, I suddenly wonder, Was my brother’s baby photo standing tall on the same dresser top?
In the photo, I see how I sent out signals—what psychologists call bids for connection—testing the world in which I found myself, getting a sense of the place I’d landed. Would I get what I wanted and needed? Would my little sphere prove secure? No child escapes wondering—especially when things seem random or heart-rending: A parent breaks a promise. A child in the nursery wallops us. Instead of being told we’re loved, we get yelled at. The little soul’s desire to be loved plays out in an imperfect world, among imperfect people. If you spend any time reflecting, I don’t have to work to make a case.
And children themselves, as we all know, aren’t immune from getting jealous and crabby and grabby. I cannot imagine I always behaved like an angel in cute footie pajamas. Even from the earliest days, there was something that was . . . well, less than pure. No matter how young, alongside the glory of being a created person, the dignity and mystery, there is less than crystalline innocence. Our mini-ego elbows its way to the front and center. When older, we pick on a neighborhood kid. Or we struggle not to hit back, stomp out, or slink away in mopey silence when everything in us wants to. We fail, in other words, to show love. So what happens when we bring to God’s offer of loving-kindness our own flawed, imperfect selves?
Amid all the influences around me, I wasn’t just getting up every morning to play or get read to, or eat Cheerios, or, when older, hustle to school. With the kids in the neighborhood, Saturday cartoons, Sunday school, all those ads, and all my feelings, I had some figuring out to do. Who would help me know what mattered and what didn’t, what would hurt a classmate’s feelings or show kindness?
Questions come up as we wade through the waters of our beginnings: Why did I do what I knew I shouldn’t, or refuse to do what I sensed I should? And what do we do with our regrets when we fail? Even a child can know when she messes up big-time, acts in defiance of the good, hurting others needlessly.
This is a serious challenge in our standing before God as we move into more self-awareness. We exist in a situation where, based on our lack, we need more than we can come up with on our own. “Surely I was sinful at birth,” wrote David in a psalm, “sinful from the time my mother conceived me.” This condition is a matter of more than an occasional “Oops!” It is not a rare lapse but, as someone put it, “a full- time career choice.”
We call out for mercy and assistance.
Here I see a connection in the Trinity—the great promise to address our common human condition, mending the habitual ways we stray and opt for self over others, over God.
“NAUGHTIES IN MY BADNESS”
My wife, Jill, was getting exasperated with our then-three-year-old daughter one afternoon. Finally, in frustration, she said, “Bekah, why did you do that?!”
What Bekah said has become part of our family lore. Without a pause, she said, “I guess I have naughties in my badness.”
We all carry a bentness. An irresistible gravity of self-involvement. An inclination toward “badness” that explains the more visible naughtiness or lapses. There’s a Latin phrase that captures this: incurvatus in se. That means you and I are turned or curved inward on ourselves. It points to how we live inward toward self and away from God. Sometimes what should be our love for others reverses course, like a river’s currents, flowing back toward the self—ourselves—so quietly we barely notice.
I saw a sign at a Home Goods store that seems to sum up this mindset: “Be you. Do you. For you.” But maturing means finding your way out of the immersion in a deep-end pool of consuming self-attention. When I look back on my life, I see a living confirmation that not only are desires natural, they also become confused and disordered, riven (if not driven) by what the Book of Common Prayer calls our “unruly wills and affections.” We learn only partially to resist the temptation to enthrone the self above every other preoccupation.
I don’t mean that self-abasement or self-loathing, religious or otherwise, has any place. Religion can traumatize, instill terror when it tries too hard to convince people of their “badness” and fallenness and need for grace.
But we do know something doesn’t work. Goodness doesn’t always win out—in others or in us. “I do not understand what I do,” wrote the apostle Paul, admitting the lure and power of wrongdoing. “For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.”
This insight explains much of what confuses us and sometimes overwhelms us. We look around at incalculable cruelty in the world or recognize puzzling, persistent choices within ourselves that hurt us and others. Our self-consumed sin makes it harder to connect across relational chasms.
At the same time, the Trinity addresses our need for intimacy and restored relationships. It offers a way for reconciliation and mercy—a help that restores what is separated and broken.
The Bible doesn’t describe our tendency to do wrong as a few smudges on an otherwise white sheet of paper, or a checklist of teeny-tiny slip-ups. Instead, it speaks of something more serious: sin, a word that may make us uneasy, perhaps because you’ve heard it shouted from a platform or brandished like an emotional weapon rather than explained with care. Maybe such language makes your anxiety rise or your self-worth feel shaky. That word, though, points to a condition that runs through all of us, touching every life, every heart, the entire human race.
The disobedience of Adam and Eve in the primordial garden holds the sorry, beautiful world in its grip, even now. Holds us. If the fall of humankind was personal, it’s also chronically communal. Our root captivity to sin passes from imperfect parent to imperfect child, generation to generation. “You can’t self-help your way out of this,” James K. A. Smith said of our predicament of self-immersion. As a species, we share in the disobedience of Adam and Eve in a headlong fall from paradise.
And it comes with a boatload of fear. A fear that, rather than drive us from God, can draw us closer in.
Lent as a season is the perfect time to get in touch with such hard yet hopeful truth. For we sort through who we are in the setting of mercy, with a backdrop invitation to receive help and forgiveness. The prayer for the season of Lent in the Book of Common Prayer helps here: “Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves. . . .” True love arrives from beyond ourselves. How dependent we are on God’s forgiving grace and help. Contrary to our worries, how ready is God to offer it.
It takes a Trinity, you could say, to stage a rescue—so fixed are we in the loops we keep rehearsing. Paul gives the blessing that names our need: “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.” Who could do without the whole fellowship of the Three? We live by grace—God’s love, Christ’s mercy, the Spirit’s communion-making nearness. Not only in a marked season of Lenten days, but across every season of our sometimes broken, always imperfect, still-possible lives.
Excerpted and adapted from Fully Beloved: Meeting God in Our Heartaches and Our Hopes. Used by permission of Nelson Books.
Timothy Jones is a writer and Episcopal priest who lives near Nashville. He once worked as an associate editor at Christianity Today magazine. Over the years he has written almost a dozen noted books on prayer and spirituality. More recently he's written for Ekstasis magazine, Fathom magazine, and The Christian Century. He blogs at revtimothyjones.com and in his newest book, Fully Beloved, explores the doctrine of the Trinity in ways normal people can relate to.