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Relationship is at the core of the doctrine of the Trinity. To say that God is Triune is to say that at the heart of who God is, is a set of relationships. In Jesus, Christians believe they are seeing in incarnate or human form, the face of the divine, specifically, the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity. But notice the intimacy with which he speaks of his relationship with his Father and the Spirit. The intimacy is so profound that there is a oneness or unity which is both the source and aim of these relations. The threeness is one and the oneness is three. There is stability and dynamism at once.
If we turn to our own lives for a moment, we realize that those moments or experiences which carry the greatest meaning are those which somehow are marked by relationship, intimacy and forgetting of self in “the other”. To use a romantic image, the man and woman who fall in love with one another undergo a change in that the focus is no longer on the self, the individual, but on the other. Each “forgets” him or herself in the loving gaze at the other. In the course of the relationship, they solidify that love in marriage and the mutual love and giving away of self results in a third. The child now enters into the picture, the fruit of the love of the two. The love could not be contained simply between the husband and wife. The goodness and beauty of the relationship overflowed, if you will, and the product of that love is another who would now become the object of the love of the parents and over time, as the child becomes cognizant of the love shown by the parents, he or she also actively engages in this dynamic of the loving gaze, toward the mother at one time, toward the father at another and of course a similar, if distinctive gaze is returned by the parents. At their best, each of the three “forgets” him or herself for love of the others.
While this of course is not a constant in the life of the family (the teen-age years do approach inevitably), hopefully there are at least moments of this kind of goodness and beauty. These moments are the truth of our lives. In them, we see our best selves, our true selves. If it is true as Christians and Jews believe, they we are made in the image and likeness of God, then somehow, God is like this. God is expressed in his very nature as relational. In the establishment of the covenant with Israel, that loving gaze is made formal. For Christians, this covenant is brought again into focus in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. And through this Jesus and the relationship he attests to with the Father and the Spirit, Christians come to believe that somehow the very nature or essence of God is relationship. As such, he acts always in a relationship of love toward his creation but also in himself, Father, Son and Spirit. To remind ourselves then, what our own true selves look like, Christians do well to consider the mutual love and relationship of the Trinity, both in itself and in the way that Trinity reaches out in love to humanity. At the same time, we come to have some felt experience for what the Triune God is like in so far as we reflect upon the truth, goodness and beauty of our own lives and the experiences of love and intimacy and mutual outpouring we have and recognize in them, glimpses into the very life and heart of God.