TRINITY Sunday is a tough challenge facing the preacher. For the worshipper in church, it can be bewildering. Puzzle over the abstruse language of the creed: "Begotten, not made", "Being of One substance". Hymns such as "Three in One, and One in Three" can also be opaque.

We need a revitalised mode of envisaging the Trinity today. A good starting-point is Moses some 3500 years ago. He did not discover God in a theological assertion, but in a spontaneously burning and unconsumed bush. Hidden in this is a powerful Trinitarian image that speaks now.

God the Father is the fire, the incandescent centre of all that is. Christ is the light flowing out from the crackling thorn-bush, engulfing the world's darkness. The Holy Spirit can be discerned in the smoke hovering mercifully over the universe.

The punch lies in God's words to Moses: "Put off your shoes from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground." The essence of God the Trinity is not a linguistic formula, but holiness.

This opens the gate to a transformative spirituality. Home in on the world, search for the pearls of holiness there, and you will find God. The poet and priest Gerard Manley Hopkins sums it up in- imitably. "The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil."

This sets us off on a thrilling and often surprising pilgrimage, a journey during which we are constantly on the look-out for the Holy One. The Victorian mystic Joseph Mary Plunkett is more precise:

I see his blood upon the rose
And in the stars the glory of his eyes.
His body gleams amid eternal snows,
His tears fall from the skies.

So all becomes grist for the spiritual mill, for the uncovering of the Trinity in landscape, people, tragedy, joy, despair, the unfolding of each day, and the vast sweep of nature.

It may not all be plain sailing. Like the gold-panner in the remote hills, there may be days, months even, when all we find is sour dust and hard, bleak rock. There seems to be no joy, no hope in the world. Persevere, and one morning we might unearth a nugget of gold and come face to face with the Eternal, as Moses did.

We can go a step further, and transpose all this into prayer. As the hymn-writer David Evans put it, drawing on Psalm 37.7: "Be still for the presence of the Lord, the Holy One, is here. . . Be still, for the glory of the Lord is shining all around."

This is truly soul-shaking; for it means that prayer is not a few fumbling words asking God for favours, or a dreary repetition of formulaic theological statements. It is a conscious moving into that place of silence, where the holiness of God the Trinity pulsates, enfolds, and leaves us breathless with wonder.

Words become superfluous. We simply rest in that warming fire, and come away renewed and inspired, with a flame of sacred love burning in our hearts.

This does not entail a jour- ney into isolation, a moving apart from the world into an austere emptiness. Inevitably, something of the holiness will rub off, and the fruit of the Spirit will blossom in us, and shower out on to humankind.

So shrug off linguistic conundrums on Trinity Sunday. Search for the burning bush in every moment of life, sacred and secular. Make prayer an entry into the shimmering presence of the Holy One. Then Trinitytide will truly become a time of revelation and glory.

The Revd David Bryant is a retired priest living in Yorkshire.