coffee shop trinitarianism

A young friend of mine who is interested in what he calls "theistic understanding of the world," having grown up within the " consumeristic understanding of the world," said to me that he is having a problem: he has read enough C . S. Lewis to know that to be a christian, he must believe in the trinity. My first response to him was, "why would you want to be a christian?" We have had some interesting dialogue following.

But a reflection i have had from this interchange is that most of the people i know who consider themselves practicing christians do not seem to believe in the trinity. God for them is Big Daddy in the Sky with all the goodies. The Son is not God the Son but the son of God, as often as not a sort of cosmic whipping boy, willing to run interference for us at our asking. The Holy Spirit is a sort of heavy breathing, not the Lord and Giver of Life, but something that proceeds from the Father the same way exhaling does. Certainly not the sort of equal Persons of the creeds and of the Ruvelev icon.

As i talk to people about the Trinity, i try to describe the experience the early Messianists had, nearly all jews by birth or baptism, who were accustomed to beginning their day with the shema: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is One." It was their profound experience of the holiness of Yeshua which led them to the God-talk (theology) that resulted after more than 400 years, in what has become for most of us today, I'm afraid, the doctrine of the Trinity.

But how do we really experience the Holy One in Three Persons? What is the praxis of the Trinity?