There are certain intellectual problems that can take over my mind four hours on end, if I let them. For all the countless hours I have spent puzzling over them, I have never solved them. In the end I seem no closer than when I started.

One of these problems is the Trinity: one God, one divine nature, in three divine Persons. On the face of it, a logical contradiction.

Last week I found myself once again circling around this enigma, trying yet another new theory to explain the inexplicable. In fact, I intended to devote this Theological Soapbox to an exposition of the theory.

But an insight stopped me: an insight that has been a long time coming. I realized that I have always had a hard time dealing with strong feelings about people. I often repress such feelings without much awareness that I am doing so. But if I repress a feeling, it will come out in some other way that I can more easily tolerate. With me a repressed feeling will often present itself as an intellectual problem because I am comfortable with intellectual problems.

So I asked myself: what feelings might I be repressing that are presenting themselves as a problem about the Trinity? When I posed the question I knew at once that my obsessive attempts to unriddle the mystery of the Trinity resulted from repressing feelings.

I stopped asking, how do I understand God? and began asking, how do I feel about God? The immediate response was, I feel very little about God. This has been so for as long as I can remember. This lack of feeling and emotion toward God has not been something I have advertised. I am embarrassed by it. It seems inappropriate in someone who has been ordained to the priesthood in the Catholic Church. Surely a priest should exemplify the feelings of warmth, love and gratitude that we ought to feel toward God.

Besides that I was a Jesuit for seventeen years. The core of Ignatian spirituality, the spirituality of the Jesuits, is a profound emotional love of Jesus. I would go so far as to say that St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), expected that those who adopted his  spirituality would fall in love with Jesus, as Ignatius himself seems to have fallen in love with Jesus. Loving Jesus, a person could not help but love the one that Jesus called “Father” with the same love that Jesus had for his heavenly Father.

This never happened for me. Though I think of my leaving the Jesuits as motivated by love for the woman who became my wife, it may be equally true to say that I left the Jesuits because I could not find with them the love for God that Ignatius wanted his sons to have. When I left the Jesuits I clearly knew that in order to develop the kind of relationship with God that a Jesuit ought to have, I would have to marry. Ironically, of course, marriage automatically carried with it expulsion from the Jesuits and suspension from the active priesthood.

When Alanna and I got married I hoped that my love for her, which was ardent, emotional, and sexual, would flow into and transform my relationship with Jesus and God, and that I would fall in love with God as I had with Alanna. What I failed to understand then is that despite my apparent lack of feeling for God, no one is closer to me than God, and the closer to me a person becomes, the more my relationship with that person takes on the quality of my relationship to God.

So marriage did not solve my problem with God, and were I to do nothing I would end up having the same problem with Alanna that I have with God. I would begin to repress my feelings for her as I have repressed my feelings for God. But while marriage in itself does not solve my problem, it provides the context in which I can solve my problem. As I begin to express feelings with Alanna that I have till now repressed, her response, which is to love and accept me, gives me the courage to continue allowing those feelings out.

I am, like so many others, in recovery. For me recovery has the double sense of recovering something as well as recovering from something. I am recovering my feelings for God by recovering my feelings for my wife and other people. For me the words of the evangelist have never rung truer: “Anyone who does not love his brother or sister whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen” (1 John 4:20).