The paradoxical nature of faith is that it is simultaneously deeply personal and also communal: The feelings of each person are individual, the call that each person feels toward God and Christ is unique, and yet the very nature of that call is that it brings each one of us into the community of other Christians on earth and, we hope, into the company of God after our deaths.
My own faith shares these qualities, for it both defines me as an individual and as a member of a larger Christian community. I was raised as a Baptist but have been for some time a member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and have found a sense of homecoming in this church. My beliefs are in many ways that of the traditional Protestant, sanctified by the traditions of the church while at the same time deeply personal.
At the core of my beliefs is my faith in the Holy Trinity as an emblem of the Church as a whole. For me the Trinity - that God exists in three different forms, and that I can have a relationship with each of these, is both a statement of fact as well as a metaphor for the complexity of the relationship between the human and the divine. For me the concept of the Trinity encompasses first the God of the Old Testament, the God of the Hebrews. But it represents that God made known to the Christian in new ways, first and foremost in the teachings and body of Christ and then in the Spirit that inspired the founders of the Christian Church to create this new institution on earth that would connect us each one to the other. The Trinity is God the Father and God the Son, but also the Church itself. And finally the Trinity exists for me on a more metaphorical level, for it embodies the essential concept of God as a being who is, first, the source of all goodness and of all life; second the flowing out into the world (and into Christ and into each one of us) of both life and goodness; and finally a return to the source as we each, when we die, re...