The Holy Trinity: The Ultimate Love Triangle

Have you bumped into the Holy Trinity lately? Based on our traditional notions of what the Trinity looks like—the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit as three distinct entities—most of us would answer ‘No’. Based on Unity’s conception of the Holy Trinity, however, we actually encounter the Trinity everywhere, at all times.

That’s because Unity construes the Trinity as emblematic of the tri-fold nature of what we call ‘God’. As Elizabeth Sand Turner wrote in Be Ye Transformed (p. 18):

The Trinity is not three separate gods but one God in three phases of expression. As the divine Creator, God is Father; as the Divine Self in humankind, God is Son; and as spiritual life and power in activity, God is Holy Spirit.
Father – In Unity, the ‘Father’ represents God in the Absolute; God as Divine Mind, Spirit, or pure Principle. Love, in this ‘phase’ of expression (as ‘Spirit’), is the idea of universal unity or Oneness. No different or distinct from God, Love simply is and is all there is.

Son – God as the ‘Son’ (aka the ‘Word’ or the ‘Christ’) refers to the Divine expressed at the personal (‘Soul’) level. Like Jesus, each of us has divinity within us. Also like Jesus, we have the innate capacity, which we can develop through prayer and meditation, to embody God perfectly—i.e., to be the ‘Christ’, or, in this case, to be Love. In Unity, we express this Truth about ourselves using “I AM” statements, such as “I AM Love” or “I AM Christ.”

Holy Spirit –God as the ‘Holy Spirit’ is God in expression or activity. This is the phase of God that expresses in and as the sensory world (‘Body’). In this phase, Love might express in a multitude of ways—as joining in prayer with another, changing a baby’s diapers, smiling at a stranger, or speaking supportive words to a friend.

Unity teaches that every expression or activity of love that we experience arises from our laying hold of the Divine Idea of Love at the point of each of us. That idea is expressed through us or even as us at the level of the Body (Holy Spirit). Thus is the tri-fold nature of God, the “Trinity”, present at all times, in all things that we see, do, and experience.
Love goes awry only when we forget that God is the Source of all things and operate instead with a belief in finite resources. Spirit is infinite, but the material world appears to enforce lack and limitation. When we focus on what our senses rather than what our Faith perceives, we may conclude that there simply is not enough love to go around. Then we must hoard and maneuver for all the love we can possibly get.

This often begins in childhood as many of us vie for our parents’ attention and affection. At the level of sense conscious-ness, moreover, even giving love implies sacrifice—after all, if there is only a finite amount of affection or energy available, then giving anything means losing something.

A ‘Love Triangle’ is a classic example of a situation founded on the belief that there never seems to be enough love or resources to go around. Someone’s loss seems to imply someone else’s gain. And, if our consciousness remains at the level of the material world, this does appear true!

But, when we remember that God is our Source, we can lay claim to our inheritance of infinite Love. Not only do we thereby fill ourselves from within with peace, love, harmony, we also express and offer more love to a love-starved world. This is what it means to activate the Divine or Ultimate Love Triangle.

"Whatever you see for your love, that it will draw to you, because as a magnet it attracts whatever you set your desire upon. To focus your love about self and selfish aims will cause it to draw around you the limited things of personality and the hollow shams of sense life. To focus your love upon money and the possessions of the material world will make you the slave of mammon, and will make your life a failure and a disappointment. To focus your love upon anything less tha
All-Good will eventually cause you to fall short of your highest aspiration, and will keep you outside the kingdom of heaven." nn- Charles Fillmore, Talks on Truthn