Who or What is The Trinity?

Augustine, while puzzling over the doctrine of the Trinity, was walking along the beach one day when he observed a young boy with a bucket, running back and forth to pour water into a little hole. Augustine asked, “What are you doing?” The boy replied, “I’m trying to put the ocean into this hole.”

Then Augustine realized that he had been trying to put an infinite God into his finite mind.

I really like the explanation by Tertullian, one of the theologians of the early church, who described the Trinity in a metaphor. God the Father he described as “a deep root, the Son as the shoot that breaks forth into the world, and the Spirit as that which spreads beauty and fragrance.”

Martin Luther said “To try to deny the Trinity endangers your salvation, to try to comprehend the Trinity endangers your sanity.”

And more recently, Justo L. Gonzalez, director of the Hispanic Theological Initiative at Emory University, said that some people approach the Trinity like it was a crossword puzzle. Then he counters, “Trinity is a mystery, not a puzzle. Love is a mystery, a crossword is a puzzle. You try to solve the puzzle, you stand in awe before a mystery.”

If these are the explanations of the wise and brilliant theologians over time, what hope have I when it comes to explain the wonder of God?