The issues seem to entail conflation...
Modalism conflates Physis with Hypostasis...
Physis conflates (often) Ousia with Hypostasis...
Hypostasis can conflate Ousia with Physis...
So that just using three terms, which we translate as Nature, Essence and Person, the field can quickly turn into a programming [so to speak] nightmare...
For myself, and this is absolutely primary for me, the understanding that God is Person is bedrock. THAT, you see, is HOW I encountered Him in Spirit... The first and primary feature of that encounter is that one is having an encounter with a Person...
For instance - Back when I denied the existence of God, and could prove that He did not exist, and could not exist, I has my first encounter with Him... I was walking into my living room with some fresh coffee heading for the sofa and absolutely crushed my little left toe into a heavy table leg and barely made it to the sofa to set the coffee without spilling it on the coffee table, in great pain of the toe... And as I squeezed the to waiting for the pain to subside, a small voice came into my mind that said: "It was because you were having a rotten thought, you know..."
Now I did NOT know where that thought came from, and in my pain I yelled back at it: "That is the most crazy psycho-thought ever! You don't stub your toe because you have a rotten thought, and besides, I don't even remember thinking anything at all except how good the coffee will be and the crossword... What a stupid idea! Where did THAT come from?"
And it was true, I had to admit, that I was prone to stubbing my toes on hard objects fairly regularly, so I said to myself, "maybe next time, I will remember what I was thinking about just as I stub it again... But that idea is just plain nuts..."
Didn't wait long - Next morning, as a matter of fact, carefully navigating with my coffee around the heavy legged table, I smashed that same little toe into the coffee table, dropped the cup quickly onto the table and cried out in agony onto the sofa holding my foot, but I remembered to ask: "What was I just thinking?" And Lo and Behold! I had been thinking about a person who had treated someone I cared about pretty badly, and I had been thinking, just as that poor already bruised and inflamed toe smashed itself into the coffee table... "I wonder how HE would like it IF..." SMASH-TOE=PAIN... And I held my poor toe and said to myself: "OK - THAT was just a coincidence, OK? I mean, maybe it might be true on occassion or so, but rotten thoughts do NOT cause toes to get stubbed - That is a crackers notion if I ever had one..."
So the next day, I slept in a little, and some friends came by, and I fixed them some coffee, and brought it out to serve them in the living room on the coffee table, and smithereened that same bruised little toe into a bleeding ball of excruciating agony as I set the coffee down, and I rolled onto the couch clutching that pain with tears running down my face, and my friends looked at me in horror and asked:
"WHY are you LAUGHING???"
And I said:
"BECAUSE... I had a ROTTEN THOUGHT!"
So now everyone knows what I am REALLY like...
I did not know it was God, but I knew it was NOT me... And it WAS a person, speaking from within me... So I put it on a back burner... When years later I met God AS God, I was meeting Him in Person having Power...
To this day I do not know if it was God speaking... I suspect it was probably some Saint somewhere in some cell or cave, moving in the Spirit with God moving him, who decided the atheist needed some greening... Who knows?
To finish the story, I said to myself, "OK - NO MORE rotten thoughts! And I stopped permitting them to myself. Period.
I have not stubbed my toe again in 50 years or so now...
So maybe we can start with Person, the Person of God, because this is ultimate condescension, to meet Him Who is the Author of all... Without all His OUSIA/POWER sizzling one like burnt steak in the encounter... We ALL know what Person means... We have to be taught its hypostatic Mystery...
PPS - How are your toes these days?
1n1, Ya change y'er bloody socks yet?
I love you guys!
Arsenios