Meandering (Without Losing Our Wits)

As he that denies [the Trinity] may lose his soul so he that tries to understand it may lose his wits.

One's psyche gives mystery enough for himself and all who know him. How do we know ourself? 

One of the pivotal points in my life came when a beloved teacher applied classical theology to what I always took to be a sort of basic human problem which I must solve by myself limited to human resources. I always got stuck.

I spoke to my teacher about deep and difficult life-problems, most having to do with self-awareness, certainties of self-understanding that were often negative and less than, let's say, "joy-inducing." This was a habit of mind that often expressed itself in denial of what others said. I was scared to trust others -- not sure why. It seems I either fully trusted with abandon or withheld trust no matter what. There was no reasonable middle ground of receiving love, testing the bounds of friendship, withdrawing or leaning in as was called for in plain experience.

On this matter of self-awareness, intermingled with a somewhat tortured conscious, my teacher took me to the Trinity. Trinity?

"In the Trinity you have each person of the Godhead in dynamic, real interaction with the other two divine persons. Their identity is clarified, in some sense made actual, by the relationship: Father is not Father unless there is Son; Son can't be Son if there is no Father. And the Spirit does not issue forth from Father and Son without those very persons." He said it something like that. The grounding point, as I understood it, was this: we are not an entity in and of ourselves and we never really know ourselves, much less become who we are, without others.

Theologians would take issue with my best meander on matters of Trinity, but the conclusion still seems valid, and as I said, it was pivotal for me. I am not a monad. My own self-perception is not trustworthy. This is true for many reasons but especially because I am not a person in myself. Rather, I am a person issuing forth from others and so in some sense in intrinsic reciprocal relationship with them. While not as organic as that with parents, other relationships also are vital not only to my self-perception, but to the reality of who I am and who I am becoming.

I'll close with this, the final comment from my teacher, something like: "We can never know ourself by ourself. We must have others. This is more than social science or some such. It is grounded in the way we are made. Relationality is baked into all we are and it follows we need others to know who we are and even to become who we are."

Wow. I'm not even sure what to do with the end of that meander, but it helps and I think it at least strives to find the truth. So I will leave it for now.