BLESSED TRINITY SUNDAY

Bishops have been known to provide a pastoral letter for Trinity Sunday.    They wanted to spare us priests the task of having to talk about the Trinity, which could get us bogged down in abstract philosophy and could be a real turn-off for the congregation.   So, they provided us with the escape root of a pastoral letter, usually about the feast of Corpus Christi.

 But some years ago, as a community, we decided that the feast of the Blessed Trinity was far too important to pass over.  Hence this back-page comment.       I will try not to be abstract, and to show that the Blessed Trinity is at the heart of our Christian daily lives.   

Why is the Blessed Trinity so important to us?   Well, we were made in God’s own Trinitarian image and likeness.  When we were baptised in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, we began to share in God’s own life.  The Blessed Trinity gives us our identity as God’s children.   Our perfection consists in becoming ever more like the Blessed Trinity. Our happiness lies in knowing and loving God as He really is.   That means as one God, who is three equal persons, each being fully God, not a part of God.   We express our faith in the Blessed Trinity by beginning our prayers by saying, ‘In name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit,’ and are blessed in the name of the Blessed Trinity, which is involved at every moment of Our Christian lives.  

When we try to know and love the Blessed Trinity, let alone explain it, we’d be right to think that’s taking us out of our depth, as we realise we’re confronted with a mystery –the greatest of all mysteries.  But let’s not panic!   We’re used to living with mysteries in our daily lives.   We don’t fully understand ourselves, let alone anyone else. We’re constantly being taken by surprise. 

But that doesn’t prevent us loving each other. In fact, the mystery makes us much more interesting to know and love.   We can destroy love by too much analysis –by trying to define and categorise people.   So, we shouldn’t be put off by God being the greatest of all mysteries.

Instead, we should welcome and love the mystery of the Trinity, which is God.  If we try to force God to fit into our limited understanding we will end up with a deity of our own fashioning.  That would be idolatry.   If we can’t force people into pigeon holes and then think we understand them that’s much truer of the Blessed Trinity.   For people to love a fantasy of us would be an insult. The same would be  truer if we treated God that way.  He, we, want to be loved for ourselves, not for what people want us to be.

God has revealed something of Himself by telling us the different ways in which each member of the Trinity is involved in our salvation.         In John’s Gospel we’re told that God loved the world so much that he sent His only Son, not to condemn the world, but to save it.  The Son expressed God’s love for us by becoming one of us and sacrificed His human life so that we could share His divine life.   No one could show us greater love than that.  And before ascending to heaven Jesus sent God’s Spirit into the world to enable us to share the divine happiness which Jesus had won for us on the cross.    Without the activity of each member of the Blessed Trinity our life as Christians would be meaningless.

Obviously there’s much more that could be said about the Blessed Trinity.  But in the end, we don’t get to know someone by putting him or her on psychiatrist’s couch or anatomist’s dissecting table. That’s no way to get develop a loving relationship.  Instead. We welcome them for who they are.   We welcome the wonder, the mystery of their being.  We delight in being with them, and have the confidence to share our joys and sorrows, hopes fears.  That’s how human relationships grow, not through cold analysis.  The same is true for us getting to know and love ths Blessed Trinity.

So, let us not be put off by God being so mysterious, but welcome him for what He really is –the Blessed Trinity.      Today, above all others, let be reduced to silent adoration before the mystery of the Blessed Trinity.   We will know, love and praise God much, much better in heaven.   That will be our eternal happiness.

Isidore Clarke O.P.