The Trinity is often presented as a puzzle: How can one be three and three be one? Mathematicians haven’t come up with any answers to that, so let’s treat the Trinity as a mystery to live, not a puzzle to solve. After all, it was through living the Mystery that the apostles preached a Triune God.

The mystery begins at Creation. The Breath of God breathes on the primordial waters and the Word of God calls the world into being. Then, God breathes God’s own life into the first human made out of wet clay.

Think about it a moment. Having been made out of the clay of the earth, we are each called to life by a silent voice that resonates deeply within us with God’s Desire, and the Breath of the same God enlivens us with that same Desire.

Of course, we don’t remember either the Call or the Breath. We emerge into life with forgetfulness, quickly falling prey to anger and anxiety, even though the Call and the Breath continue without ceasing. In daily life, we use memory to refer to remembering things such as appointments, how to do things, and what books we’ve read. But the great mystical writers in Christianity such as St. Augustine and St. John of the Cross use the word “memory” to refer to recollecting ourselves in the Memory of God who Calls us and Breathes in us. That is, memory, this deeper memory, is recollection in the Trinity. If we stop and think, we might hear the still small voice of this inner memory calling us and breathing in us. If we are fortunate enough to have people in our lives who take time to remember deeply, our own deeper memory is quickened.

At the end of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus commands his disciples to “go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Mt. 28: 19) In itself, this admonition sounds abstract but, as St. Paul explains, the baptism of which Jesus speaks is a baptism into Jesus’ death and Resurrection. (Rom. 6) That is, we are baptized into the death of the Word that Calls us into being when the Word was killed by angry and anxious people like us and brought back to life by the quickening Breath that inspires us to understand, in the depths of our own desires, the Desire that lead the Word that calls us to do such a thing for our sakes.

Most of us don’t remember being baptized any more than we remember being created. I don’t, having been baptized as an infant. But even for those whose baptism is a memory in the lesser sense, we have to remember in the deeper sense, the mystery of our redemption in the same way that we must remember the mystery of our creation. Again, the deeper memory is grounded in the work of the Trinity in our lives. For St. Augustine, Psalm 42 points to this mystery: “Deep calls to deep at the thunder of your cataracts;.” (Ps. 42: 7)

If we puzzle over the numbers, we miss the adventure of the mystery of living deeply in the memory of the Trinity calling us and breathing through us out of the depth of the Godhead. This is a mystery we need to live each day as we live in a world where so much anger and anxiety pull us towards forgetfulness. But if “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit” is with all of us as St. Paul affirms in his closing words to the Corinthians, then we will “agree with one another [and] live in peace.” (2 Cor. 13: 11-13) And, we will preach this deeper memory to others by the way we live our lives.