Canadian Trinity: Rocks, Trees, and Water

A Canadian Trinity
Notes from www.billbrucewords.com
Victoria Day & Trinity Sunday, May 18, 2008

Text: Proverbs 8

This was the Victoria Day long weekend, and Trinity Sunday. Lots of our folks participated in the Canadian ritual of opening cottages up north. I confessed that until I was an adult, I was part of that culture that assumed church stopped from Victoria Day to Thanksgiving Day. Certainly our family packed up every weekend and left the city for a cold water cabin by the lake.

We live out lives in urban gridlock, stuck in streets and avenues. I generally prefer using my TTC Metropass and York Region Transit passes to get around. I know all about gridlock in the city, and how to avoid it – this week I was learning that in York region, we don’t have a grid, rather a lot of circular suburban enclaves – but we still have lock, travel paralysis!

‘Gridlock’ is just a metaphor for living within the restraints of rigid order. We live too small, in social and cultural patterns that we know are not worthy of our potential, or God’s intentions. Little wonder that come summer, we try to get ‘off the grid’, to cottage country, or through other holy days and re-creations. I’m heading to Ireland in August, the Emerald Isle!

Many of you have told me, and several confirmed this Sunday, that your greatest spiritual experiences have occurred ‘off the grid’ in the Canadian Northern Shield, on canoe and camping trips. That’s why I call it the Canadian Trinity: ‘rocks, trees, and water’. We get ‘off the grid’ in our sanctuary worship – but we prefer to get right ‘off the grid’ amid rocks, trees, and water.

In the Cree language, the words for rocks, trees, and water are assiney, mistik, and nipiy. Cree does not distinguish rigidly between nouns and verbs, adding prefixes and suffixes to elaborate on what is expressed. Cree distinguishes between animate and inanimate, masculine and feminine. Rocks, trees, and water are animate – and feminine. That language speaks truth.

Our tradition shares the insights implicit in your experience of rocks, trees, and water, and the Cree language for the same Canadian Trinity. Hokmah, or wisdom, the Holy Spirit, is named with metaphors of wind, water, and fire. It’s never simply a product or technique of the creator, but a partner or aspect of divinity itself, the very soul and spirit of creation

All of this is poetic comment, not an ontological or metaphysical claim. It’s a literary use of personification to talk of the feminine aspect of the godhead, she who is wisdom. Our traditions don’t hypostasize that resonance ‘of the grid’ as a god-dess – but we know her well, and build relationships with her not despite, but because of our understanding of creation and incarnation.

Recent modern Americans have reflected on this creation-centred spirituality: Matthew Fox, or Elizabeth Dodson Gray’s Why the Green Nigger, Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek or Teaching a Stone to Talk, or Rosemary Radford Reuther linking how we use and abuse the ‘other’, whether woman or Jew or environment. But the Americans are loudest, not first.

I kept reciting a couple of portions of St Patrick’s Breastplate, a bit of Celtic spirituality attributed to the saint who synthesized barbarian and Roman spiritualities:

I arise today through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity
Through the belief in the threeness, through the confession of the oneness,
of the Creator of Creation.

I arise today through the strength of heaven:
Light of sun, radiance of moon,
splendor of fire, speed of lighting,
swiftness of wind, depth of sea,
stability of earth, firmness of rock…

We didn’t invent the Canadian Trinity of ‘rocks, trees, water’ – we just developed our own vernacular version of ancient traditions. We are not simply theists and deists, whose engineer God built a world and then stepped back – nor are we only pantheists finding God in creation – we are pan-en-theists, worshiping God in and beyond, incarnate and transcendent.

It’s Trinity Sunday, and the music reminded us of ‘Father, Son, and Holy Ghost’, the patriarchal version of orthodoxy. But our Jewish and Muslim neighbours politely ask if we worship one God or three, monotheists like them, or polytheists. And our feminist and environmentalist neighbours ask us if our God is always on the grid of capitalist and technological hierarchies.

Our experience and our tradition freely transgress to boundaries of the grid. Today we heard Proverbs 8, about wisdom, present at creation, like the logos of John’s gospel. This savvy knowing, for fools and the ignorant, offering a shrewd intelligence ‘from Mom to MBA’ as I called it in the Easter season hereticslikeus.com browsing of these texts.

Wisdom says she was there at the beginning, coeval with the creator, like an artisanal partner, master of work, perhaps subordinate, but playful and delightful. Translators try to suppress the heretical implications, but this is feminine, animate, resonant spirituality of God in and through and beyond all creation. I’ll append the translation we read aloud, at the end of these notes.

When you pray, to whom, or through whom do you visualize or imagine your prayers to be directed? Is it really an old white guy on a throne with a beard? I don’t think so. This is a community of flaming mystics, who affirm their experience of divinity amid ‘rocks, trees, and water’, ‘off the grid’ in this sanctuary or out in the Canadian north

I recited William Blake to you, lest you think we were inventing all of this:

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour


I told you I’d add Thoreau to these notes. Sitting at Walden Pond, he found roots for his civil disobedience, not unrelated to our own ‘rocks, trees, and water’:

It is no dream of mine / To ornament a line
I cannot come nearer to God and Heaven / Than I live to Walden even
I am its stony shore / And the breeze that passes o’er
In the hollow of my hand / Are its water and its sand
And its deepest resort / Lies high in my thought

Lest you fear that this was some vague escapist spirituality of spirituality, I also mentioned political theologian Dorothee Soelle’s attempt to ‘democratize mysticism without trivializing it’ and Dom Helder Camara, the Brazilian bishop who stared down repressive governments:

When I stand before customs-officers and police-commissioners,
I smile mischievously, for no one detects
The divine contraband, the stowaway,
Whose highly discreet presence is visible
Only to angels’ glances


This was the Victoria Day long weekend, and Trinity Sunday. After a week and a winter in urban gridlock, or suburban lock without grid, we enjoyed a long weekend ‘off the grid’ – either up in cottage country communing with the Canadian Trinity of ‘rocks, trees, and water’, or in the Thornhill sanctuary, imagining something older, deeper, beyond the narrow constructions of life.

Listen again with us to the way our tradition speaks of it all in Proverbs 8. This translation relies heavily on the Jewish Publication Society translation, the Jerusalem Bible most used in the Roman Catholic tradition, our own New Revised Standard Version, and some notes from me:

It is Wisdom calling / Understanding raising her voice.

She takes her stand at the topmost heights,
By the wayside, at the crossroads,
Near the gates at the city entrance;
At the entryways, she shouts,

“O mortals, I call to you; My cry is to all humankind.
O simple ones, learn shrewdness; O dullards, instruct your minds.

Listen, for I speak noble things; Uprightness comes from my lips.
My mouth utters truth; Wickedness is abhorrent to my lips.

All my words are just, None of them perverse or crooked;
All are straightforward to the intelligent person,
And right to those who have attained knowledge.

Accept my discipline rather than silver, Knowledge rather than choice gold.
For wisdom is better than rubies; No goods can equal her.

I, Wisdom, am mistress of discretion, The inventor of lucidity of thought.
Good advice and sound judgment belong to me, Perception to me, strength to me.
(To fear Yahweh is to hate evil)

I hate pride and arrogance, Wicked behaviour and a lying mouth
I love those who love me; Those who seek me eagerly shall find me.

By me monarchs rule And princes issue just laws;
By me rulers govern, And the great impose justice on the world.

With me are riches and honour, Lasting wealth and justice.
The fruit I give is better than gold, even the finest,
The return I make is better than pure silver.

I walk in the way of virtue, In the paths of justice,
Enriching those who love me, Filling their treasuries.

Yahweh created me when this purpose first unfolded, Before the oldest of these works.
From everlasting I was firmly set, From the beginning, before the earth came into being.

The deep was not, when I was born, There were no springs to gush with water,
Before the mountains were settled, Before the hills, I came to birth;
Before Yahweh made the earth, the countryside, Or the first grains of the world’s dust.

When he fixed the heavens firm, I was there, When he drew a ring on the surface of the deep,
When he thickened the clouds above, When he fixed fast the springs of the deep,
When he assigned the sea its boundaries, - And the waters will not invade the shore –
when he laid down the foundations of the earth,

I was by his side, like a master worker, Delighting him day after day,
Ever at play in his presence, At play everywhere in his world,
Delighting to be with the children of humanity.

And now, my children, listen to me:
Happy are those who keep my ways.
Hear instruction and be wise, And do not neglect it.

Happy is the one who listens to me, Watching daily at my gates, Waiting beside my doors.
For whoever finds me finds life And obtains favour from Yahweh.
But those who miss me injure themselves; All who hate me love death

What word do you have for our hearts, O God, give us ears to hear. Amen.