Trinity Sunday

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

A number of years ago in Asia, I asked a six-year-old fellow how many persons there were in the Blessed Trinity. Very confidently he said, “Four.”

I was curious to find out who were the four persons in the Blessed Trinity. I asked him, “And who are the four?”

And he said, “Lucia, Francisca, Jacinta, and Mother Teresa.”

He was from a very good Marian family; he had a lot of piety. But it also brought home the point of the importance of doctrinal formation for children so as to know the important points of our faith.

The Catechism tells us that there is a hierarchy of truths in our faith, and at the top of that hierarchy is the Blessed Trinity.

Today we celebrate the Feast of the Blessed Trinity: God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit.

“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teach them to observe all the commands I gave you. And lo, I am with you always; yes, to the end of time” (Matt. 28:19-20).

To a large extent, in the Old Testament, God reveals Himself as one. although there are references to the Blessed Trinity. But it's in the New Testament that God is more revealing of Himself as a Triune God.

We get to know a little bit more about the Father and the Holy Spirit. Our Lord said, “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30). “Ask anything in my name and the Father will grant it” (John 16:23). “I will send you the Advocate to be with you all days, even until the end of the world” (John 14:16).

Little by little, over time, God lets us know more about Himself as three in one. Three persons in one divine nature.

Nature describes how we act. Human persons act according to our human nature. God acts according to His divine nature. There are three persons in God acting according to that one divine nature.

We also have revealed to us in Scripture that “God is love” (1 John 4:8,16). The Holy Spirit is the love of the Father for the Son. The Catechism tells us that the Blessed Trinity is “an eternal exchange of love” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, Point 221).

Pope Benedict in his Encyclical, Deus Caritas Est–“God is Love”, says that every act of charity is “a manifestation of Trinitarian love.”

God pours out His love into our souls through the sacraments. “The charity of God is poured into your heart through the Holy Spirit” (Rom. 5:5), St. Paul says.

That love is meant then to find expression in our concern for others. All this is a manifestation of Trinitarian love. We are called to love. The Christian vocation is a vocation to love. The Church is a manifestation of love.

If you think of every act of charity being a manifestation of Trinitarian love, think of all the healthcare acts of charity performed by the Church in the last twenty centuries, and all the work of educational institutions all over the world. It's like the Church is giving a great manifestation of Trinitarian love to the whole of humanity.

John Paul II liked to talk about how the Blessed Trinity is “a communion of persons.” And it's a life-giving communion of persons because the love of the Father for the Son gives rise to the Holy Spirit.

He also liked to say that “the family is a communion of persons” and “marriage is a communion of persons.” He says it's a life-giving communion of persons (John Paul II, Apostolic Exhortation, Familiaris Consortio, November 22, 1981; Letter to Families,February 2, 1994).

The more a family is open to life and gives life, the more they reflect the Blessed Trinity. John Paul II lifted up the whole of marriage and family life onto a Trinitarian level. Food for thought.

We can ask the Blessed Trinity to come and live in our souls in grace. The greatest way for man to live on this earth is in a state of grace.

God is in his soul. And if God is in our soul, then God will make Himself felt in our soul, and from our soul will radiate the effects of Trinitarian love.

There is no greater thing that a human person can do than to live in the state of grace and to die in the state of grace; hence our concern is that people around us would live a life of grace.

The opposite is also true. If God is not in our soul through mortal sin, then, the devil is there, and if the devil is present in many souls, and if they are ruling an organization or a family or a country, then, of course, the fruits of the devil will be seen.

This is where the Church says that the social sins of society are always a consequence of personal sin—the accumulation of the personal sins of men: oppression, misery, injustice, corruption.

If we want to do something about these things and end these things, the first priority has to try and be concerned that all men would live in a state of grace. Hence the importance, the great social importance, of the sacrament of Confession for the changing of society, so that we allow the Blessed Trinity to act in our souls.

This day is a very good day to give thanks to the Blessed Trinity. Grátias tibi, Deus, grátias tibi: vera et una Trínitas, una et summa Déitas, sancta et una Únitas.

Give thanks to the Blessed Trinity for all the gifts that God has given to you in the course of your life—particularly those that you are unaware of. Anonymous gifts. Silence gifts. Things we take for granted every day. Our sight, our hearing, our two legs, our two arms.

St. Paul says to the Romans, “All who are guided by the Spirit of God are children of God. What you received was not the spirit of slavery to bring you back into fear. You received the spirit of adoption, enabling us to cry out, ‘Abba! Father!’ We are children of God” (Rom. 8:14-16).

When we live with God and bring God into things, then, things go better. Things are more ordered. There's a certain sense of peace and security—the peace of the children of God, a consequence of God living in our soul.

A little girl in kindergarten class was asked once to explain the Blessed Trinity. And she said, “My Mummy says that God is like sugar in my milk. When she puts sugar in my hot milk every morning, I can’t see the sugar. But when I taste it, I know it's there.”

She says, “God is like that. We can't see Him, but we know He's there. And if my Mummy forgets to put sugar in my milk, I notice it immediately.”

Likewise, if God is not present in places, in situations, in people, you also realize that those situations or people or places lack a certain divine sweetness that should be there.

“…and if we are children,” says St. Paul, “then we are heirs—heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ” (Rom. 8:17).

We are heirs to a wonderful spiritual legacy. It's very good we behave like people who have inherited a wonderful legacy. We want that legacy. We want to have it. It makes us spiritual millionaires.

It helps us to be more effective in all sorts of ways. We can ask God to help us to come and get a bit of a glimpse of this great mystery of the Trinity.

A mother brought her little daughter to the beach one day, and the mother lay down to take the sun, and the child went off to make a sandcastle. As she built her sandcastle, she went down with a little bucket to the water, and she filled the bucket with water, and she brought it up, and she poured it into a sort of a moat that she'd built around the castle.

But the water all disappeared into the sand. So she went down and she got another bucket and quite a few buckets of water, but they all kept disappearing into the sand.

She noticed that even though she had taken quite a lot of buckets out of the water, there seemed to be still plenty of water there. She went to her mom and said, “Mom, how big is the sea?”

The mother was racking her brains—now how do I answer this question, how big is the sea? She wanted to answer it in a way that the child could understand.

Then she said, “Well, if you were to spend the rest of your life going down to the water's edge with your bucket and filling it with water and coming up and pouring it into the moat of your sandcastle, and you did that every minute of every hour of every day for the rest of your life, you would still not exhaust all the water that there is in the sea.”

The child got this idea of the immensity of the ocean. She was silent for a moment, and then she asked, “And is God bigger than the sea?”

The mother was very happy, because the child had been able to go from the idea of the immensity of the sea and of the ocean to the immensity of God. The greatness of God fills all spaces. He is everywhere. He is omnipotent.

It's very proper that occasionally we might pray the Athanasian Creed, which describes very clearly some attributes of God, the Blessed Trinity—that He’s immense, that He's everywhere, that He's omnipotent. It's a Creed that dates from the early centuries and reminds us of these great realities.

Now these days, it's very proper that we might say that little aspiration, “Tibi laus, tibi gloria, tibi gratiarum actio.” We give praise to you. We give glory to you. We give thanks to you.

Humble souls are grateful souls because they realize the greatness of the gift. That realization of the greatness of the gift leads them to want to give thanks.

In the Preface of today's Mass, it says, “Three persons equal in majesty, undivided in splendor, yet one Lord, one God, ever to be adored in your everlasting glory.”

One of the things that the Church teaches us to do is to adore God, to make acts of adoration. Mass is an act of adoration. A genuflection is an act of adoration. We could try to genuflect well and teach children to genuflect well. Or the simple process of teaching them to make the Sign of the Cross well—it can be a thing they will remember for the rest of their life.

The Blessed Trinity has come to bring about a kingdom on earth. God's kingdom.

Another preface, the Preface of Christ the King, talks about “a kingdom of truth and life, a kingdom of holiness and grace, a kingdom of justice, love, and peace.” So very beautiful things.

It's appropriate that on a day like today, we stop and contemplate the Blessed Trinity.

Chesterton, who converted to Catholicism in the 1920s, said, “In our society, we grow arid, not for lack of wonders, but for lack of wonder” (G. K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles).

We may not stop frequently enough to wonder. To wonder at creation. To wonder at the beauty of nature.

There's a poem that says, “I think I shall never see something as beautiful as a tree” (Joyce Kilmer, Trees). I think that poem is on the Internet. You can find it with those lines.

It's a contemplation of a tree, and the beauty of nature and the beauty of God coming through each tree that we see or the grass that grows,

God is a mystery. We can't fully understand that mystery. St. Josemaría liked to say that if God could fit inside our small minds, then He wouldn't be much of a God if we could understand Him with our limited minds.

Pope John Paul II has said the dogma of the Holy Trinity can be compared—although all comparisons are nothing but a shadow of the real thing—to a beautifully cut large diamond, with many facets and faces. You have to turn it round and round, trying to capture, one by one, all the fascinating features. You have to keep turning it over and over again, unsatisfied, knowing that there's still more to it.

You look at it under daylight, and again under electric light, and finally with a magnifying glass while holding it in the palm of your hand. But still, the thing is just too much. The way it sparkles, the way it reflects light, the way it breaks into the colors of the spectrum—it's just amazing.

Somebody else said it's like a piece of complex machinery, like one of those old-fashioned watches with so many interlocking parts. You have to turn it round and round to see if you manage to understand how it functions, and how it is put together.

This, I think, says John Paul II, is what the Church has done, as she has distilled over the centuries the contents of Scripture, the doctrine of the Fathers, and the piety of the common people. The Church makes us turn round and round the same truths, makes us look at each one of the facets of the jewel over and over again.

It seems repetitious, but in the end, we begin to see some light. In the end, the fundamental features of the dogma are securely identified, and ingrained in our minds and in our life of piety.

Pope Benedict has said, “The great news of Christianity took place when the Trinity penetrated space and time.” In other words, when Jesus became man, it was a great moment in human history. So many things depended on that.

We can ask Our Lord that we might have an awareness of that great moment, to appreciate it, to thank God for having become man, so that we can really make full use of this great truth in our life.

“Let us not forget,” says St. Josemaría in the Furrow, “that in all human activities, there must be men and women who, in their lives and work, raise Christ’s Cross aloft for all to see, as an act of reparation.

“It is a symbol of peace and of joy, a symbol of Redemption and of the unity of the human race. It is a symbol of the love that the Most Holy Trinity, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, had, and continues to have, for mankind” (Josemaría Escrivá, Furrow, Point 985).

This is the central mystery of our faith and of Christian life: God One and Triune. He's very close to each one of us.

Pope Benedict says, “It's not a simple illumination that breaks the darkness for an instant, but the seed of divine life placed forever in the world and in the hearts of men.”

These are very profound words, but words that are appropriate to try and help us to delve a little bit into the depth of this mystery.

“The stupor,” says the Pope, and he uses that word, “the stupor that the mystery of God inspires, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is the fountain of all the other mysteries of the faith and at the same time, the light that illumines them.”

The Trinity is a mystery of love among the three divine persons. It's not closed in on itself in a perfect circle of light and glory, but it radiates in the flesh of men in their history. It penetrates men and women and regenerates them, making them sons and daughters in the sun.

St. Irenaeus said, “A living person is God's glory…human life consists in the vision of God” (St. Irenaeus, Against Heresies).

“Believers,” St. Augustine said, “can experience intimacy with God Himself, discovering that He's not infinite solitude, but the communion of light and love” (St. Augustine, as quoted by Benedict XVI, Angelus, June 11, 2006).

In this world, no one can see God, but He made Himself known so that, with John the Apostle, we can affirm, “God is love. … We have come to know and to believe in the love that God has for us” (1 John 4:16).

For those with faith, all the universe speaks of God, One, and Triune. Everything that exists leads back to a being who communicates Himself in the multiplicity and the variety of elements as in an immense symphony. In this love, human beings find their truth and happiness.

The greatest thing for human persons to do is to seek after that truth and happiness, which can only be found in God. The more people run away from the goal of their life, the less they find God.

Where one person of the Blessed Trinity is, the other two persons are also present. St. Thomas Aquinas says that when God the Son, the second person of the Blessed Trinity, is present in the Sacred Host in the tabernacle, by divine concomitance, by a mystery we don't understand, the Father and the Holy Spirit are there also.

When Our Lord was dying on the Cross, as a human person He was dying, but that human nature was attached to His divine person. The Father and the Holy Spirit were also present there on the Cross in some way.

St. Peter says that by divine grace, by sanctifying grace, “we become partakers in God's nature.” Partakers in the nature of God is something incredible.

“Through these,” says St. Peter, “the greatest and priceless promises have been lavished on us, that through them you should share the divine nature and escape the corruption rife in the world through disordered passion” (2 Pet. 1:4).

Through that divine grace, the Holy Spirit dwells in the soul of the just.

The whole of the life of a Christian is one of talking to and dealing with each of the persons of the Blessed Trinity.

We're told in Christ Is Passing By, “The Holy Mass brings us face to face with one of the central mysteries of our faith because it is the gift of the Blessed Trinity to the Church. It is because of this that we can consider the Mass as the center and the source of a Christian’s spiritual life” (J. Escrivá, Christ Is Passing By, Point 87).

When the Blessed Trinity comes into our soul, they bring peace, and joy with peace. “The Trinity,” said John Paul, “is not distant or impersonal.” To demonstrate the opposite, the Pope explained that this presence of the three divine persons is happening at every moment of our life.

With great reason, St. Teresa of Ávila says, “Let nothing disturb you. Nothing frightens you. All things are passing. God is unchanging. Patience gains all. Nothing is lacking for those who have God. God alone is sufficient.”

We're also told in Christ Is Passing By: “The Blessed Trinity has fallen in love with man, raised to the level of grace and made ‘in God's image and likeness.’ God has redeemed him from sin—from the sin of Adam, inherited by all his descendants, as well as from his personal sins—and desires ardently to dwell in his soul: ‘If anyone loves me, he will keep my word and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our abode with him'” (J. Escrivá, Christ Is Passing By, Point 84).

We could try to invoke the Blessed Trinity with greater frequency, perhaps saying the Glory Be to the Father calmly and with attention, or making the Sign of the Cross with a little more care and attention as well.

Pope Benedict says, “The first element of Eucharistic faith is the mystery of God Himself, Trinitarian love. … We should therefore exclaim with St. Augustine (De Trinitate, Book VIII): ‘If you see love, you see the Trinity’” (Benedict XVI, Apostolic Exhortation, Sacramentum Caritatis, February 22, 2007).

That's why love is such a beautiful reality, how everyone needs love, searches for love, is moved by love—because we see the Trinity. Every charitable act is a manifestation of Trinitarian love.

“Our Lady,” says Pope Benedict, “…is a masterpiece of the Most Holy Trinity…because divine love found perfect correspondence in her, and in her womb the only begotten Son became man” (Benedict XVI, Angelus, June 11, 2006).

We're told in Holy Rosary, “The most Blessed Trinity receives and showers honors on the Daughter, Mother, and Spouse of God. ...—And so great is Our Lady's majesty that the angels exclaim: ‘Who is she?’” (J. Escrivá, Holy Rosary, The Assumption).

We turn to this “masterpiece of the Blessed Trinity” who can lead us to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit with ever greater frequency.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

MVF