“[Allah is] the originator of the heavens and the earth. [There is] nothing like a likeness of him” (Koran chapter 42:11). Christian artists often depict God as an old man with a long beard and the Holy Spirit is pictured as a dove. Jesus is portrayed with long hair and a beard but we have no idea what He looked like. All we know is that he was a first century Jew. Are these images helpful? One problem is that God has been masculinised so the feminine is excluded and transferred to Mary. Yet Mary is one of us; she is not a goddess although she represents what God’s creation was meant to be.
God is spirit. What is important is that the Trinity is a union of love between the three distinct persons, who want to share this love with their creation. There is a continual invitation to us to participate in this love. Mary responded to this invitation so fully that the Second Person became man and gave us a picture of what God is like.
St Ignatius Loyola was privileged to experience an intense joy in a vision of the Trinity:
“...While praying the office of Our Lady on the steps of a monastery, his understanding began to be raised up, in that he was seeing the Most Holy Trinity in the form of three musical keys and this with so many tears and so many sobs that he could not control himself. And on walking that morning in a procession which was leaving from there, at no point could he restrain his tears until the mealtime nor after the meal could he stop talking, only about the Most Holy Trinity.” - Autobiography