The Most Holy Trinity appears to us then as a community of love: to know such a God means to feel the urgent need for him to speak to the world, to communicate himself; and the history of salvation is nothing but the history of God’s love for the creature he has loved and chosen, wanting it to be....molded in the image of the Image, which is the Son, brought to perfect communion by the sanctifier, the Spirit of love. Even when man sins, this God seeks him and loves him, so that the relationship may not be broken off and love may continue to flow. And God loves man in the mystery of the Son, who let himself be put to death on the Cross by a world that did not recognize him, but has been raised up again by the Father as an eternal guarantee that no one can destroy love, for anyone who shares in it is touched by God’s glory: it is this man transformed by love whom the disciples contemplated on Tabor, the man whom we are all called to be.

 Therefore the most energy-laden poetry is the spiritual and the symbolic kind, which speaks to us through suggestions, that signals gently from soul to soul...

Icon-painting is constructed the same way. It does not even pretend to represent adequately any material reality. It is a sum of symbols...Remember the lines — soft flowing — of Rublëv’s “Trinity”, the mysterious circle that we may trace as we look at these three figures. These are symbols. Rublëv certainly did not claim to represent what is unrepresentable, to represent God. That is forbidden in the Bible, because the Eternal, the Infinite absolutely transcends everything earthly. This is when a true artist provides us with a symbol. What is represented on Rublëv’s icon? Incarnate love. Three persons who are carrying on a silent conversation. The bonds between them are like a magnetic field of love. They are similar to one another and at the same time different. They are one and yet are distinguished. It is this mystery of love that connects them, and not just love, but self-giving love. Here the table with the sacrificed animal signifies the sacrifice of the Eternal, which is offered by God to bring the world nearer to Himself and to save it.

Marcas Palamas

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“Christ, A Tabernacle of Glory

There is a tabernacle of glory, which is the most holy person of Jesus the Lord, where the divine and the human meet in an embrace that can never be separated. The Word became flesh, like us in everything except sin. He pours divinity into the sick heart of humanity, and imbuing it with the Father’s Spirit enables it to become God through grace.

God Loves Man in the Mystery of the Son

But if this has revealed the Son to us, then it is given us to approach the mystery of the Father, principle of communion in love. The Most Holy Trinity appears to us then as a community of love: to know such a God means to feel the urgent need for him to speak to the world, to communicate himself; and the history of salvation is nothing but the history of God’s love for the creature he has loved and chosen, wanting it to be “according to the icon of the Icon” – as the insight of the Eastern Fathers expresses it – that is, molded in the image of the Image, which is the Son, brought to perfect communion by the sanctifier, the Spirit of love. Even when man sins, this God seeks him and loves him, so that the relationship may not be broken off and love may continue to flow. And God loves man in the mystery of the Son, who let himself be put to death on the Cross by a world that did not recognize him, but has been raised up again by the Father as an eternal guarantee that no one can destroy love, for anyone who shares in it is touched by God’s glory: it is this man transformed by love whom the disciples contemplated on Tabor, the man whom we are all called to be.

A Mystery Enveloped in Silence

Nevertheless this mystery is continuously veiled, enveloped in silence, lest an idol be created in place of God. Only in a progressive purification of the knowledge of communion, will man and God meet and recognize in an eternal embrace their unending connaturality of love.

A Solemn and Humble Liturgical Doxology

Thus is born what is called the apophatism of the Christian East: the more man grows in the knowledge of God, the more he perceives him as an inaccessible mystery, whose essence cannot be grasped. This should not be confused with an obscure mysticism in which man loses himself in enigmatic, impersonal realities. On the contrary, the Christians of the East turn to God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, living persons tenderly present, to whom they utter a solemn and humble, majestic and simple liturgical doxology. But they perceive that one draws close to this presence above all by letting oneself be taught an adoring silence, for at the culmination of the knowledge and experience of God is his absolute transcendence. This is reached through the prayerful assimilation of scripture and the liturgy more than by systematic meditation.

Adoration: a Theological Method

In the humble acceptance of the creature’s limits before the infinite transcendence of a God who never ceases to reveal himself as God – Love, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ in the joy of the Holy Spirit, I see expressed the attitude of prayer and the theological method which the East prefers and continues to offer all believers in Christ.

What Man Needs Today: Silence

We must confess that we all have need of this silence, filled with the presence of him who is adored: in theology, so as to exploit fully its own sapiential and spiritual soul; in prayer, so that we may never forget that seeing God means coming down the mountain with a face so radiant that we are obliged to cover it with a veil (cf. Ex 34:33), and that our gatherings may make room for God’s presence and avoid self – celebration; in preaching, so as not to delude ourselves that it is enough to heap word upon word to attract people to the experience of God; in commitment, so that we will refuse to be locked in a struggle without love and forgiveness. This is what man needs today; he is often unable to be silent for fear of meeting himself, of feeling the emptiness that asks itself about meaning; man who deafens himself with noise. All, believers and non – believers alike, need to learn a silence that allows the Other to speak when and how he wishes, and allows us to understand his words. (Orientale Lumen, 15 and 16)”

 Pope (Saint) John Paul 2nd

from Everyday Glory, Gerald R. McDermott:

We should not be surprised, for as the early Christians in Syria argued, the world was created by the Logos, whose very name (“Word”) suggests communication. As we saw in chapter 1 from Ephrem of Syria, “In every place if you look, his [Christ’s] symbol is there, and wherever you read, you will find his types. For in him all creatures were created, and he traced his symbols on his property.” Ephrem added, “When he created the world, he looked to adorn it with icons of himself.”

“Here is {Jonathan} Edwards on the extent of God’s messaging: “I am not ashamed to own that I believe that the whole universe, heaven and earth, air and seas . . . be full of images of divine things . . . [so much so] that there is room for persons to be learning more and more of this language and seeing more of that which is declared in it to the end of the world without discovering [it] all” (WJE 11:152). God has a reason for his method, said Edwards—namely, that he is “a communicating God” who is ever speaking, ever imprinting his creation with messages, and ever revealing more and more of his beauty. But that characteristic—of being an ever-communicating Being—is only penultimate, not ultimate. It is an end or purpose of his works, but not his final end. The last end of all he said and did, in creating and then redeeming, is to bring glory to himself. Eighteenth-century skeptics said that idea sounded selfish. Edwards replied that it was selfish only if bringing joy and beauty and love to his creatures is selfish (see WJE 8:450–53). So the purpose of imprinting the entire creation is for the sake of God’s glorifying himself, but that happens only when his creatures find their greatest joy in seeing his beauty. And that beauty is, in a word, love. And all the beauties of this world—from the beauty of the intricate design of a simple cell in a simple leaf from a simple tree, to the phantasmagoria of a distant galaxy seen from the top of a mountain on a cloudless night, to the splendor of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, to the beauty of the most beautiful woman in recent history, Mother Teresa (!)—all of these earthly beauties are but refractions of the beauty of the self-denying, servant love of the three persons of the Trinity. In Edwards’s language, all of these beauties are types or images for which the antitype (the referent, or thing to which the type points) is the eternal beauty of the mutual love among the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”

Trinity Icon, Andrei Rublev (1370-1430)