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Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31
Romans 5:1-5
St. John 16:12-15
My years acting gave me a different perspective on what it means to be a human being. I have played MacBeth, the tyrannical, power-hungry King of Scotland. I have played one of the ditzy star-crossed lovers in A Midsummer’s Night Dream. I played a comic character in Neil Simon’s The Good Doctor and Don Juan in Man and Superman and lots of what are called “spear-carrier” roles, where you’re really nobody but simply a tool to carry forward the plot, you know, the messenger or something. And I’ve played Jesus Christ.
And one of the things acting teaches you is that you carry all these characters inside of you. I am a tyrannical, murderous, despot; and I am a nameless spear-carrier with a walk-on part. I am Don Juan, the great lover; and I am the ditzy, star-crossed lover driving some poor woman crazy in Midsummer Night.
And I am Jesus Christ. And so are you.
Freud said, “Nothing human is alien to me.” He meant that every one of us carries within us Lincoln and Hitler, Eleanor Roosevelt and Catherine D’Medici, the greatest saint and the worst sinner. Actors know this firsthand, because they have to get in touch with their inner axe murderer to play an axe murderer, and their inner Mother Theresa to play Mother Theresa. When they put on these roles, it’s not like they’re pretending—it’s like they’re BECOMING. And for great actors, this can be very daunting. They sometimes feel they are getting lost in the role. You may have heard recently that Daniel Day Lewis struggled with this in preparing for the part he played in “There Will Be Blood.” He’s a great actor. They can lose themselves in the part.
When you read the cast list in a play, it says at the top, Dramatis Personae, “The Players in the Drama.” The term persona is the Latin Term for the mask that classical actors would wear when they played certain parts. If you played Oedipus, you wore an Oedipus mask; Antigone, an Antigone mask. We use it similarly today, when we say someone taken on a different “persona,” meaning they aren’t acting like themselves. They’ve put on a new mask.
This term persona is also the term that ancient theologians used to describe the three persons of God—The Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit—Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer. The three Personae comprise what we Christians call the Trinity, God the three-in-one. It is a way of saying that we see many faces, many personas, of God. God is creator of everything—of the earth, of the universe, of all there is. That aspect of God is eternal and immutable. We call that persona of God “Father,” traditionally, to maintain that God not only made us, but is intimately involved in our lives—God loves us. That persona of God is also holy and incorruptible and cannot die.
But we also call God the Redeemer, the one who takes what’s broken and makes it right. We humans have corrupted God’s good world. So God, in love, has bent over backwards to make it right, and the way God did this was to take human form, to become frail, vulnerable, corruptible, and mortal. Again, God did this out of love. Yet this persona of God seems contradictory—how can holy, divine, immutable, eternal God take on human form?
But is it so different from our own experience? Don’t we know ourselves to be a bundle of contradictions, a tyrant one day, a hero the next; courageous one day, cowardly the next; loving one day and despicable the next? We put on personas of all sorts, all the time.
And finally, we maintain that God is the Holy Spirit, the one who sustains the world. If God is holy and above created experience, it seems strange and contradictory that through the Spirit God actually lives IN human experience, is active in the world, in fact infuses everything and makes it one with God’s self. Add to that we believe the Holy Spirit is the presence of Jesus Christ, God’s son, living within us, redeeming us and through us redeeming the world God has made. And all this is true because God loves what God has made, and is bent and determined to heal the world and make us one with Him and with one another and with all of creation.
When I read the Gospel reading, you may have noticed that I called the Holy Spirit “she.” This is largely because of our reading from Proverbs which tells us about Lady Wisdom, who was there at the Creation with God, and who therefore could be counted as one of the Persona of God—the female side of God. Scripture and Tradition link the Holy Spirit and Lady Wisdom or Sophia, so it’s not unusual these days to call the Holy Spirit “She”—the female Persona of God.
Now over the centuries, the Doctrine of the Trinity, the Three-in-One, has had a lot of critics. Our fellow monotheists, Jews and Muslims, think we’re cheating, and that we’re dangerously close to saying that there’s not one God, but three. But I’d argue that actually we’re saying the same thing they are: That God is One. What we’re doing, though, is saying that God speaks to us and is at work in the world in many different ways. Like us, God puts on a different mask, a different persona, for each occasion.
But unlike us—and this is important—God does this with integrity. I don’t mean to impugn anyone’s integrity per se, except that all of know that we are not “well-integrated.” While God is one, we are far from it. We are all well-aware that there are parts of ourselves that are at war with one another, whereas this is not so with God. While God may sometimes be the Judge of all creation, and of us, God is also the redeemer of creation, and of us. There’s no contradiction between God’s judgment and God’s love because LOVE IS THE CHARACTER OF GOD. It’s what drives each persona. God created us out of love. God redeems us out of love. God dwells in us and seeks to unify us with one another and with Him through the Spirit—to make love a living reality.
God is one. One way to think of it is that God lives in community, three persons in one. A community is the most clear physical, material expression of love—you can’t love by yourself, you have to have another to love.
God IS what we’re called to BECOME. God is a loving community, whole and complete, one. God wants the same for us. We think our differences with others are insurmountable—but they’re just the manifestations of the different personae of being human. God is calling us to integrate those personae and overcome our differences and alienation and form a community—with Jews, with Muslims, with people of different races, with people we can’t get along with, with everyone—so that we can be whole and one like God.
God is what we’re called to become as individuals. God is whole and has integrity in God’s self. All God’s personae serve the purposes of God’s love. Whereas our different personae are rarely integrated and often at odds with one another. Not only that, we don’t love certain aspects of ourselves. We’re ashamed of certain things about ourselves, or we’ve locked certain parts of our personalities away. God calls us into wholeness and integrity as individuals so that we can be more like God. This is what it means when we say, “the Lord God is one, and you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, and all your mind, and all your soul, and all your strength.” It’s a call to integrity, a call to be like God in wholeness. Isn’t it true that we give part of ourselves to God, but never all of it? But God who is One, is calling us to oneness—our heart, soul, mind, and strength completely united in loving God.
But then Jesus adds, “And love your neighbor as yourself.” There, you see, the circle is complete. God, who lives in community as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, calls us into community as well, into oneness with each other through love. Loving our neighbor is no different from loving ourselves—it’s the call to unity and oneness and wholeness with one another, as well as unity and oneness and wholeness within ourselves. You can’t have one without the other. It’s especially important to realize that we can’t love ourselves unless with love our neighbor. The things we hate in our neighbor are the things we hate in ourselves. Maybe we don’t express it the way our neighbor does—especially when our neighbor might be violent, cruel, judgmental, even evil, in ways we aren’t—but nothing human should be alien to us—we have the seeds of their evil in ourselves, and to come to terms with it in ourselves we have to come to terms with it in our neighbor. In many ways, it’s most important to our own souls that we learn to love our enemy, because to love our enemy means that we’ve learned to love the part of ourselves we’re most alienated from. Not to love our enemies, on the other hand, puts us in danger of not recognizing that side of our own souls, and hence giving it unnatural power over us. To love our enemy is to love ourselves.
It’s all a circle, it’s all part of whole that God is putting together, bringing all the disparate pieces of human life and creation, the differences and alienation between people, our ambivalence even in ourselves about ourselves, our mixed feelings about who we are—God is bringing it all together into one, with him and within ourselves, and with creation and with each other—
And all of it is tied together by love. For God is love.