The Encircling Three

8-31-21 The Encircling Three

I confess that when I read the news each day or face personal challenges, I sometimes feel the world and my life are out of control. I don’t think I am alone in feeling this way. But I have to regularly call to mind the truth that the Encircling Three is always holding me close, always loving and caring for me, and sovereignly running the world.

In his book Celtic Spirituality: Historic Roots for Our Future, Ray Simpson explains that the discovery that three persons run the world is expressed at Jesus’ own baptism. “There was the Father in the form of the voice from heaven, the Son in the form of Jesus the man, and the Spirit in the form of the dove that settled on Jesus (Mark 1:9-11); it was thereafter expressed at every Christian’s baptism (Matthew 28:19).”

The Trinity is an important doctrine of the Christian faith and central to all Christian traditions whether Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Protestant. This doctrine was conveyed in Jesus’ Great Commission: “Go then to all people everywhere.… Baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 23:19).

As I have said before, the understanding of baptism was not intended to be a formula for a one-off occasion of a sacrament. Rather, it was meant to be descriptive of the kind of life believers are meant to have—a life immersed in the Trinity.

The Trinity is at the center of Celtic Christianity from its beginnings under the leadership and teaching of St. Patrick. The Lorica of St. Patrick was long believed to have been written by him, but in recent years it has come to be considered anonymous. However, it certainly represents the spirt of St. Patrick and the Celtic Christian monastic tradition in which a lorica is a prayer recited for protection asking God to use his power to safeguard against evil in its many forms.

All prayer is an act of dependence as we come to God recognizing our dependence on him to do in and through and for us what only he can do. I love the way St. Patrick’s Prayer begins because it is thoroughly Trinitarian:

I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through a belief in the Threeness,
Through confession of the Oneness
Of the Creator of creation….

Doctrine has its place and is very important. But for early the Celts, it’s not a doctrine so much as a way of understanding the presence of an intimate loving God—the Encircling Three who had invited them into relationship, into fellowship in the midst of their everyday lives. This one true God is personally present, personally vulnerable, personally available —whatever is happening, whatever we are doing in our lives.

Much of what we know about Celtic Christianity is thanks to Alexander Carmichael who collected the sayings of the nineteenth-century Scottish highlanders in Carmina Gadelica. Many of these poems and prayers reflect the profound understanding of the Trinity, whom they addressed as the Three:

The Three who are over my head, The Three who are under my tread,

The Three who are over me here, The Three who are over me there,

The Three who are in the earth near, The Three who are up in the air,

The Three in the great ocean swell, Pervading Three, O be with me.

The Three be about your head, The Three be about your breast,

The Three be about your body, Each night and each day,

In the encompassment of the Three Throughout your life long.

I lie down tonight, With the Triune of my strength,

With the Father, with Jesus, With the Spirit of might.

In praying this prayer, we get the sense of being immersed in the encircling three-in-one God  who is holding us up, holding us close, enveloping us with his loving presence, sustaining us by his grace, strengthening us by his power in every way we need. God is with us and will never leave us. He will be faithful to help us no matter what comes.

As humans, we are tempted to think and believe it’s all up to us to do what needs to be done. That is not only tempting as individuals but collectively as the church. It’s good to remember that the Encircling Three are the source of all love and light.

What we bring to our lives, our families, our workplaces, our community is the goodness of the Encircling Three-in-One who created us in love, saved us by his grace, and sustains us by his power for our life in him. God is the source of every gift we possess, and he wants us to use all that we are and all that we have for his glory and the good of others.

I close with this beautiful prayer also from Celtic Spirituality. I am praying this for myself and for all of us in this time of change:

A Prayer

May the love of the Three give birth to a new community;

May the uniting of the Three give birth to a new solidarity;

May the flowing of the Three give birth to a new creativity;

May the oneness of the Three give birth to a new unity;

May the glory of the Three give birth to a new society.

A Response: I will often immerse people, places and myself in the joy, power and protecting presence of the Sacred Three.