Exodus 34:4b-6, 8-9; 2 Corinthians 13:11-13; John 3:16-18.

June 19, 2011

Feast of the Most Holy Trinity

Sr. Phyllis Jaszkowiak

“Trinity – coequal and coeternal, absolute mystery, procession or mission is generation and spiration, consubstantiality or homoousis, three subsistent relations, 3 persons or hypostasas, and circumincession or the mutual indwelling of the Trinity in itself, three persons one God.” 1

There you have it! The theological definition of the Trinity. Doesn’t that just warm your heart and bring feelings of love and gladness to the surface? Doesn’t that make you want to go out and share this good news?

Well, perhaps not. Perhaps it might be better to describe rather define the Trinity. The first image that ever made sense to me I received when doing dishes as a novice. I was at the dishwashing machine taking the dishes off the racks, when the image of the Trinity as community came to me. Three in one, a community of persons, a community of love. It has made so much sense that it is my favorite way of describing the Trinity.

Some pictures depict the Trinity, as the Father, the Son, and a dove for the Holy Spirit. Someone once said “We know the Trinity is more than just two men and a bird.” St. Patrick used the Shamrock, with three leaves and one stem to illustrate the Trinity to the Irish people. St. Ignatius of Loyola used the Triad, the primary chord of music, to depict the Trinity. When this image of cosmic harmony filling the universe forever with beautiful sound came to him, it brought him to tears because of its beauty. Another image of Trinity is a candle with its burning energy, its heat and its light.

These images hint at ways that the one God has acted in salvation history. We, as humans, have experienced God as saving us from slavery, from our sinfulness, from our narrow outlook of who God is. We have experienced God as very close to us, dwelling within us, becoming human like us. We have experienced God as our breath of life, the wind that moves us, the fire that strengthens us.

We have given names to this God – Creator, Father, Mother, Source of Life; Redeemer, Jesus the Christ, Savior of us all, Son of God; Sanctifier, Breath of Life, Holy Spirit, Fire of our faith, Wind that propels us outward. And always we speak of these three knowing they are one.

These ways of experiencing God are all through Scripture, both Old and New Testaments. The word Trinity is not used in Scripture and only came to be used in the 3^rd or 4^th century. “The church gradually and painstakingly came to certain conclusions about the inner reality of God on the basis of its experience of God within its own human experience.”2

Understanding the Trinity as far as we are able, is one thing, describing it is another, but perhaps more important is what the Trinity calls us to be and to do.

The Trinity is a community of love and we are called to be in that community of love. A love that is wider, broader, deeper than what we know right now. It is a love that goes out to everyone and everything, to all creation. It is a love that cares for the most vulnerable and the weakest among us and cares for and helps them to grow and mature. It is this love upon which all the Church’s teachings on Social Justice are based.

Our descriptions and definitions of the Trinity will never completely catch the whole of who the Trinity is. The story is told of how St. Augustine, walking the beach one day trying to understand fully the Trinity, saw a child running with a bucket to the sea, filling it up and running back and pouring it into a hole in the sand. Augustine asked what the child was doing and the child replied that he was putting the ocean in the hole. Augustine laughed and said that was impossible. The child looked at him and said, “Yes. As impossible as it is for you to understand the Trinity.”

Because we humans love mysteries, we try to find new words, new symbols, to expand our image of God, the Trinity. We know God is far beyond us, yet dwells within each of us. We know this Triune God is “characterized by freedom and compassion, fidelity and service, justice and mercy”3 and we are made in that image and likeness, and are called to bring those qualities to our world that so desperately needs the love that explodes from the Triune Godhead.

In the end what we know for sure is “That God so loved the world that God gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.” Another way to say this is from the first letter of John, “God is love, and they who abide in love, abide in God and God in them.”4

This God, who is love, is Triune and is mystery. To “embrace a God of mystery means that we live open to surprise, ready to respond in radically new ways to the One, (who is Triune,) who never ceases to amaze us. Embracing a God of mystery means that we live in relative comfort with the unknown, grounded in the assurance that the Divine (One-in Three) is ever present, ever at work in wondrously creative ways.”5

So let us continue to live and to pray, “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

1 & 2. Richard P. McBrien. Catholicism. Harper and Row Publishers, San Francisco, California. 1981 Pages 361-365.

3 & 5. Judy Cannato. Radical Amazement. Sorin Books, Notre Dame, Indiana. 2006 Page 137.

4. 1 John 4:16

6. See also Catechism of the Catholic Church paragraphs 238-267