Today is another sacred day: The Visitation, where Mary, “great with child” visited her elderly relative, Elizabeth, also miraculously pregnant.

Together they noted their hope and expectation that their children would change the world.

This hope and expectation is felt by every parent, I think.

I hope.

But on this convergence of holy days and extraordinary days, where a beautiful visitation is met with the reality that many parents fear for their babies when they go off to school, we must call to mind this hope and expectation again.

I hope that my boys will know and fight for the truth that Black Lives Matter. I hope that they will never fall victim to unmitigated gun culture, and will never get used to the sight of hand guns and machine guns carried in public and will stay away when they see them.

I hope that my children, and the children of those I love, will honor the lives of those who have died because of our addiction to violence.

I hope that my children, and indeed my own self, who give our lives to public service will never abuse that service.

And I hope that we will one day mourn our dead the way some mourn the loss of our supposed “rights” and economic structures.

That has yet to happen. That has yet to happen.

Beloved: we are all just visiting this life. Let us do all the good we can, while we can.

Today the Church also celebrates one of our moveable, and most confounding, Feast Days: The Feast of the Holy Trinity.

Here’s the thing about the Holy Trinity: it is a mystery to be held, not a problem to be solved…so we should stop trying to solve it, already.

At its best this doctrine, and this Feast Day (which has been celebrated on this Sunday after Pentecost since at least the 10th Century), honors the ineffable nature of the Divine. Using ancient numerology and a mystic mindset, it acknowledges that some things are unknowable, always spinning, and that this can be comforting for a humanity that longs to peg everything down.

A God who cannot be pegged down is endlessly possible.

At its worst this doctrine has become a (primarily masculine) box that explains in ways that don’t make any sense who God is and how Jesus and God are related, and then throws in a bird (or are they all the same and not related at all? See what happens when you think about it too much?!).

The Trinity is a Divine whirlwind of creativity and love.

The Trinity is a thought that is foundational to all other thoughts.

The Trinity is mother of all, the stream in which time is caught up, the hovering mist that covers existence.

And it is also none of this.

The Holy Trinity is a reminder for me, and should be for the whole church, that any effort to peg the Divine down is a fool’s errand (thank God).

-Icon is Crow Trinity written by Fr. John Giuliani