Jesus said to his disciples: “I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now. But when he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you to all truth. He will not speak on his own, but he will speak what he hears, and will declare to you the things that are coming.” (John 16.12-15)
The chronicler of Native American culture, Kent Nerburn, relates in his book, The Girl Who Sang to the Buffalo, a conversation he had while traveling in a car across the high plains of the Dakotas with a Native American named Jumbo. The conversation turned towards dogs. “You got a dog now?” Jumbo asked hesitantly, as if by asking he might somehow be intruding on my privacy.
He looked down and squeezed his hands together nervously. I had come to recognize this as the gesture he made when he wanted to speak of something important. “I got something to ask you,” he said after a long silence. “Ask away.” He fidgeted a bit more before proceeding. “How come your church religion don’t talk about animals?”
It was a matter-of-fact question and asked without rancor. But it took me aback. “What do you mean?” “That’s something my grandpa asked,” he said. “He said if I ever got to know a white man I should ask it. Grandpa said he listened to white preachers and they never talked about the animals except a bad snake that had the devil inside it. He said he couldn’t trust those preachers, because, for us, the animals were good. They came to us with the Creator’s knowledge. They were the way the Creator gave us teachings.”
Nerburn writes, “This was the second time Jumbo had brought up the subject of animals as teachers. I did a quick inventory of my cursory biblical knowledge and realized that the only animals I could think of in the Bible were indeed the snake in the Garden of Eden, the donkey Jesus rode on into Jerusalem, and the pigs that were filled with demons and ran into a lake. I was sure there were more, but they didn’t play a central role in my memory. And they certainly didn’t play the role of teachers.”
“Grandpa thought your preachers probably didn’t prepare themselves,” Jumbo went on, “so the animals never visited them. He said that was because your preachers were always talking so they didn’t have time to listen. Animals don’t come to people who are always talking. That’s why I don’t talk much. I want the animals to come to me. So I always try to sit and listen.”
Although foreign to most of us, the Lakota spirituality voiced by Jumbo offers a powerful lesson to those of us unfamiliar and far removed from the spiritual world envisioned and articulated by Native Americans such as Jumbo. Central to this spiritual understanding of the world is the belief that the Creator wants to communicate to and with his creatures. And for the Lakota, that communication comes through nature, particularly through animals, that bring to humans the truths that the Creator wants to share.
The problem, as Jumbo sees it, is that non-native peoples fail to see animals as teachers, as worthy of being listened to. Instead, they talk ceaselessly, allowing no time to listen carefully. As a result, they come to know little of the spiritual world and less of the Creator who yearns to teach humans the pathway to the truth.
Today, in words taken from the Farewell Discourse of Rabbi Jesus that is found in the Gospel of John, we hear the Teacher tell his followers that he has “much more to tell them, but they cannot bear it now.” However, he tells us that in time “the Spirit of truth, when he comes, will guide them to all truth.” Pointing out that this spirit “will not speak on his own, but will speak what he hears,” Rabbi Jesus begs his followers to be attentive to this spirit when it comes to them, listening to it and responsive to its teachings.
Unlikely as it may seem, much of what Rabbi Jesus tells his followers corresponds to the Lakotan understanding of a Creator who wishes to speak to humans, sending his spirit to us so that we might learn the truth and follow it with our lives. And although Christian spirituality may say little of animals as teachers, we should not be so arrogant as to believe we have the corner on the market on the ways that the Creator chooses to communicate to and with us.
Equally important, we cannot dismiss the criticism that the Lakota spirituality addresses to us when it says we speak too much and listen too little, in this way becoming deaf to the words that the Spirit wishes to speak to us, enamored with our own words, bloated with our own opinions on what is true and what is good and what is right.
Instead, modesty and humility are essential if we are articulate the truths we believe we have heard from the Creator, truths that for the Christian have formed into a concept–understood as a means to explain– called the Holy Trinity, a belief that the one true God is experienced by humanity by way of three persons–Father, Son, and Spirit–one yet three, a difficult and challenging belief, incapable of explanation with any precision.
Hence the need for humility and a lesson from the Lakota handbook. If we are to understand in any way the ways of the Creator, then we begin, as do the Lakota peoples, with the earnest belief that our God wishes to communicate with us, desiring to share his truth with us, so that we might live well and rightly in this world, a place that requires–above all else–a keen sense of listening if we are to hear the truth that God desires to pass on to us.
And what, according to the Christian tradition, do we hear when we listen to the Creator, our voices silent as we put our ears close to the ground, seeking to hear the words that he speaks to us in the silence and in the darkness? What does he tell us of himself as we stand in the silence? What have we discerned of the truth that is, in the end, his essence and his being?
As the ages have passed since Rabbi Jesus’ call to his followers to allow the Spirit of truth to guide them, the cumulative and collective experience have combined into the belief that our God dwells within a community, distinct yet inseparable, one in three, called a Holy Trinity. Imperfect and imprecise as all attempts at imaging this indivisible unity, our human faculties insufficient to explain the inexplicable, efforts have been made to put words to the human experience of a God who communicated at the beginning of creation, later at a specific juncture in human history, and continues that communication to the end of time.
For the Christian believer, the effort to understand the triune God always begins with human experience because it is all we have. And that human experience, feeble and fallible in the face of the ineffable, recalls the God outside us at the dawn of creation, beside us in first century Judea in the God-Man of Galilee, and now inside us as we walk unsteadily towards an unknown future.
Beautifully and powerfully imagined by the writers of the Book of Genesis, the God outside us speaks into the dark abyss where there is nothing and summons from the emptiness a world that lives and that breathes. He stands outside the creation, the One who creates, but who is not created, his utterances sufficient to bring forth something from nothing. We call this Creator “Father” because this is the human experience of one who gives life.
For the Christian believer, the same God found it necessary and important to step into his creation at a specific moment in human history, becoming a part of it because his creation had become malformed and malicious, reverting to the darkness and returning to the chaos that once existed. At that moment, he became the God beside us, walking on the well-worn roads of this world, teaching us the truths we had forgotten, reminding us of the light that he created to show us the way.
Called by Christians the Son of God because the Teacher of Galilee addressed the Most High as Father, the God beside us pitched his tent among us, as the evangelist John tells us, pulling from the human experience another beautiful image that tells of the intimacy and the closeness that the Most High God wanted with us, content no longer to stand apart, but now wanting to stand with us.
When the earthly sojourn of the God-Among-Us was done, his teachings passed on to disciples who swore to follow his truths and who promised to keep his memory alive so that the world would never be destroyed by the darkness that ebbed and flowed through the human heart, he promised his continued presence with them, not in physical form, but in a spiritual form, hence called by us the Spirit.
This God that resides with us remains inside us, where he combats against our darker impulses and calls us to become the children of God that we were created to be. He continually breathes into us life and love because that is who the Spirit is, sharing with us his essence and asking us to share with all others that same life and love so that creation might continue on course to its completion as desired and designed at the dawn of time by the Creator God.
This then is the trinity that our human experience tells us is the God that we have come to know, insofar as human frailty can comprehend anything of the incomprehensible God. Always one God, but found in three persons–the God outside us, the God beside us, and the God inside us–their labors united in common purpose but divided at one and the same time.
Insofar as the One God in three persons can be known to us, it is only because he wants us to know him, his words first spoken outside the abyss at the moment of creation, repeated in the voice of the Galilean who lived beside us, truths that continue to echo into all future ages because of the Spirit that stays within us in time and in space. At every moment, then, the words can still be heard.
But for the divine truths to be heard, we must be silent, listening not so much with our ears, but with our hearts, for it is there that he abides, the Spirit of truth, guiding us to all truth, as the Man of Galilee tells us.
–Jeremy Myers
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