There was a report recently about a symposium on the Trinity in New York. Judging from the report most of the presentations seemed to be going over old ground. One idea that did strike me though is that in God there are no separate centres of consciousness and decision making. When I first started thinking that the key to understanding what it meant to be human was ‘relationship’ – to be human is not to be a distinct and separate entity but to be a nexus of relationships – I had the thought that this must also be the key to understanding the Trinity. As far as I can see most of the approaches to thinking about the Trinity come from a scriptural, or a philosophical perspective. But, if we are ‘made in the image and likeness of God’, why should we not be able to start from the human perspective. At one time it was thought that we humans were like monads, metaphysical units that have a self-contained life, independent and separate. This gave rise, among other considerations, to possessive individualists who still think like this. Much of our culture is based on the idea of individual freedom and independence. In such a climate the theology of the Trinity must seem incomprehensible. Yet, more and more, we are coming to realise that it is not separate individuality but interconnectedness which is at the root of things. This is not new and Donne saw it a long time ago when he said, ‘No man is an Island, entire of itself.’ Atoms are no longer the minuscule billiard balls we once imagined them to be but particular relationships of particles which are themselves something like packets of energy. There is no solid and substantial stuff out of which everything is constituted. There are only relationships of relationships of relationships. Nor is a person a monad-like spiritual soul which will exist eternally. I too am a relationship of relationships of relationships. Why then do we find it easier to imagine God as a single undivided unity and very difficult to imagine God as relationship? Part of the answer must be that when we look at ourselves we are so focused on the ‘me’ pole of the relationship that we see all the other poles as ‘thous’ or ‘its’. Sometimes, when two people are deeply in love, they can see themselves as a ‘we’; each is so much part of the other that each would be incomplete without the other. Sometimes this extends to a family. Rarely, I suspect, does it extend beyond this. It is not easy to grasp the idea that each of us is one aspect of a multi-polar unity. Or, maybe we can grasp the idea, but to so experience ourselves is another matter. That is the stuff of mysticism. One of the problems with this way of thinking, not only as far as Christians are concerned, but also as a result of the Christian influence on our culture and thinking for most of us in the West, has been the Church’s concern to preserve the absolute otherness of God at the expense of his immanence. We need to be more aware of the lesson of the the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats (Matt 25:40). God is within.