Hidden Trinity in Yesterday

Trinity is an arcane notion for an ordinary man. Being a usual man I used to attenuate by a jaunt with St. Augustine as I hear the concept of Trinity. It was a fine evening Augustine had a stroll on the sea shore.  He met a child who was fetching water with a sea shell from the sea and pouring to the tiny conduit he made.  Having seen this, the philosopher in Agustin had a query to the child. What are you doing? The cute and curious child replied with a smile on his face, I am trying to dry the sea. Agustin’s logical mind responded to the child and said it is impossible. The child broke the ice with a locution, ‘To dry the sea with a sea shell is unmanageable, if so the quest you have in your mind right now is impossible too. And Agustin writes he was thinking about Trinity.  The impossible becomes possible if one can think in the stream of Jesus. And it is written He communicated the Good News to the people with stories and parables. One can construe the theological notions if he / she are ready to link the day to day life events and experience with the knowledge already has with the same.  In that sense Yesterday the movie directed by        Darrell Roodt becomes a pivot to elucidate the Trinity.

Yesterday as a movie has the plot of a peculiar African woman called Yesterday who counters with AIDS and struggles to raise her daughter and to support her husband who has been collapsed by the same illness can be connected with the idea of Trinity.  The understanding of trinity is Three Persons in One God. This idea of Trinity expounds that God has 3 different personalities for different functions. Consider that Yesterday as God who owns the different personalities. The film depicts how a woman being one does the multifaceted tasks in her life. Being a woman she is a wife, mother of her daughter, friend of the teacher. As an AIDS patient Yesterday the protagonist of the film who knows her life is at stale. The awareness of the illness makes her to be more multitasked to face the music.  The people who are connected especially her husband and daughter depends on her strength, nurture and hard labor. Realities of African women are exclusively portrayed in the movie.  An explanation to the painting by Fr. Orobator SJ ( A women returning from the field with bundles of produce and firewood piled on her head and a baby strapped her back and one hand she has hoe the instrument and the other hand holds her load not to fall. The shocking part she gives breast feed for an old man) in his book Theology Brewed in African Pot underlines the same qualities of a woman.

The Trinitarian God is like Yesterday the African woman in the movie combines many sides. Yesterday is God for her husband and daughter who satiate their situational needs. The salvation history can be linked with her illness. It was a time when the earth required salvation God comes in the form of Son and continues the work through the Holy Spirit. Yesterday knew that the situation was falling worst.  And her multitasked role developed as a mother who wishes the bright future of her daughter, as a nurse who treats the husband as patient even to the extent by constructing the hospital for the better situation. Yesterday was there before the tomb of her husband as an image of the Holy Spirit who continues to be with the world in continuing the mission of Son. Yes she makes sure that her husband is safe in the tomb as the concluding scenario portrays it.

To conclude that Trinity is a God concept which we use in our theological dialogues, but many are the ways in which God meets us where we are, here and now like Yesterday. The circumstantial representation on Trinity avoids the mysterious element. God as the Trinity elaborating through the character of Yesterday from the film procures an insight which invigorates the impossible Trinity of Agustin and Church teachings. It’s in our hand and heart to choose such God, as Orobator SJ rightly said ‘God is the one we meet everywhere who sees both the inside and outside.’