The Trinity in Eight Minutes or Less

Trinity Sunday, Green Rice and Bluegill

I am told that Trinity Sunday is the one Sunday a year the clergy collectively sweat. It’s what every clergy member I follow on Substack has been saying all weekend in their writings, anyway.

Apparently, every other feast hands them something to work with. Christmas has a baby. Easter has an empty tomb. Pentecost has actual fire. But Trinity Sunday hands the preacher a doctrine — three persons, one God, co-equal and co-eternal, distinct but undivided, mutually indwelling in a way the theologians named perichoresis precisely because no ordinary word would hold it — and says, in effect, good luck, you’ve got about eight minutes.

Fr. Nick, to his enormous credit, did not take the bait.

He stood up this morning and confessed, more or less straight out, that he could not possibly explain the Trinity in eight minutes — and honestly, the relief in the room was palpable. Because the alternative is a spectacle of a good and earnest priest reaching for a metaphor, much like I do in all these writings of mine. They might say that the Trinity is like water, ice, and steam, the Trinity is like a three-leaf clover, or the Trinity is like an egg — and every single one of these, if you follow it even one step past the pulpit, marches you cheerfully into a heresy with a Latin name. Augustine wrote a whole book about it and arrived, more or less, at the conclusion that if you think you’ve fully grasped it, the thing in your hands is not God.

What Fr. Nick offered instead was a history lesson, and a faintly violent one. Back in the year 325, the church gathered more than three hundred bishops at Nicaea for the express purpose of pinning down this exact doctrine — and the argument grew so heated that, as the legend has it, St. Nicholas himself, the very saint we have since softened into a jolly man who comes down chimneys with presents, rose from his seat and slapped the shit out of a heretic named Arius right across the face. Historians on Google will tell you this almost certainly never happened, and that Nicholas may not even have been in the room. I have decided to believe Fr. Nick’s retelling. The point holds regardless: three hundred of the sharpest theological minds of the age, locked in a room to settle the nature of God, and the conversation nearly came to blows. You can perhaps forgive a parish priest in Alexandria, Virginia, for declining to attempt the same feat before lunch.

So, we did not explain the Trinity this morning. We sang, we prayed, we said the words we always say, and then we went outside.

This afternoon was the parish picnic at the Mount Vernon Park Association, which meant half of St. Luke’s was there — plates of food, lawn chairs, the easy noise of a congregation that was ready for grilled food and stuffed eggs. I was not looking for a theological experience. I was looking for a second helping. Yes, I ate both a hot dog and a cheeseburger, along with some green curry rice with olives… No, that wasn’t a typo. I ate green rice that had mayonnaise, curry and olives in it. Something crunchy, too. It could have been green bell pepper, but I’m not certain. It was good. I’d eat it again. I sat and ate with other parishioners and fully intended to spend the day exactly that pleasantly unburdened.

I had my fishing gear with me, which requires no explanation, because I always have my fishing gear with me. At any given moment the back of my car holds no fewer than five rods, a couple of tackle boxes, a wagon to haul the whole operation, Muck Boots, a casting net, a dip net, and a cooler of live bait. It also holds folding chairs, two ENO hammocks, a quilt, a hatchet, bug spray, and the means to catch just about any freshwater fish you’d care to find. I am, for all practical purposes, less a person who fishes than a small mobile outfitter that happens to hold down a day job — Oaken from Frozen hollering “yoo-hoo, big summer blowout!,” except the merchandise is bait and the storefront is my trunk.

So, when somewhere between bites I noticed that the two boys belonging to one of the couples at my table had wandered down to the water and were having a thoroughly miserable time of it, I was — as I am at nearly all times — equipped to handle the situation.

Brothers. Young, eager, and catching absolutely nothing. I watched long enough to see the problem, which was not effort — they had effort to spare — but equipment. The water was thick with bluegill, and a bluegill has a mouth roughly the size of a shirt button; put a hook in front of one built for anything bigger and it will simply nibble your bait clean off and leave you standing there, insulted. The boys had the wrong hooks and no live bait. It’s spring; the fishes are hungry. So, I did what anyone raised the way I was raised does when she sees a child losing a fight with a fish. I went over and got them fixed up — tiny hooks, a fresh supply of worms, the plain, slimy, entirely necessary truth of the thing. (For bluegill you don’t really need a rod and reel at all; a good cane pole will do you just fine. But nobody around here keeps a cane pole anymore, so we made do with what the back of my car could provide, which was, as established, anything Bass Pro could sell you on a given Tuesday.)

But the part that I’ve loved the most about today was simpler than any of that.

I did not deliver a homily on the theology of the rod and reel to these boys. There was no eight-minute explanation. I rigged the tackle the way it needed rigging, threaded on a worm, and pointed the boys at the water where the shade of a big oak gave way to the sun — because that is where the bluegill were holding, right along that line, the way they always do. Then I mostly just stayed close while they figured out the rest with their own hands. Once the setup was right, the fish more or less took care of themselves. They caught ten or eleven between the two of them in thirty minutes. I lost count, which tells you how the afternoon went.

You have never seen joy until you have seen a young kid pull a fish out of the water for the first time. It is total. It is full-body. It does not hedge or qualify or wonder whether it was really present for the moment — it simply is the moment, completely, with both feet in it. And once the boys had it figured out, they came one after another, bluegill in a generous mood, so the joy just kept compounding.

Their mom and dad were right there for all of it — not hovering, not drifting off to check a phone, just there with them. They stayed planted on that bank watching their boys haul out each fish, celebrating every single one like a game-winning shot, taking photos, making the kind of memories a kid doesn’t recognize as memories until years later, when they turn out to be the ones that lasted.

I watched them and felt something crack open that I had not gone to a church picnic expecting. Because I was their age once, doing exactly this. My Uncle Goose used to load my cousin Hunter and me onto the back of his four-wheeler and drive us out to an old bridge over a shallow creek in a place called Hardy. We fished from the bridge itself, dropping our lines straight down into the seam where the shade of the bridge met the sun on the water. That is where the sunfish stacked up — that’s what Uncle Goose called them — hanging in the slow water like they’d been starving their whole lives. You could see them shining just under the surface, and you could pull them out one right after another until your arm got tired. Those are some of the best fishing days of my life. I have never quite stopped measuring other days against them.

Uncle Goose died when I was thirteen. A car accident. He was thirty-seven, which is a number that gets younger every year I get older. I’ll be 31 in June.

But today did not feel like losing him. Today felt like getting to be him. I sat on that bank baiting one hook right after another and watching two happy kids pull fish after fish out of the water with pure glee. I had been the kid on the side of the bridge all those years ago. On this Trinity Sunday I got to be Uncle Goose.

I won’t insult you by pretending I didn’t notice the obvious. I sat down to a hot dog, a cheeseburger, and a plate of frankly inexplicable green rice, and I stood up having somehow acquired two small apprentice fishermen. Fishers of men. I refuse to write a whole article about something this on-the-nose — but I did, didn’t I? All I’ll say is that if the Spirit wanted to make a joke at my expense on Trinity Sunday, a fistful of worms was an efficient way to go about it.

The boys taught me what I think Fr. Nick was getting at by not even trying. You don’t explain the Trinity. You don’t explain the joy on a kid’s face when the bobber finally goes under, either. You hand them the rod, you stay close, and you let the thing pull them in. The understanding, if it comes at all, comes through your hands, not your head.

I’m Episcopalian. I cannot explain the Trinity in less than 8 hours, maybe 8 days. Neither can Fr. Nick in less than 8 minutes, and he went to seminary. The boys caught ten or eleven bluegills, and I caught two new fishing buddies, and for one whole afternoon I felt completely and gratefully here.

I’ll take that any day.