This past weekend the Catholic Church celebrated the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity. We heard readings from Deuteronomy, Moses tells the people follow the statutes God has set before you; Paul's letter to the Romans, "We have a spirit of adoption, and we call Abba, Father(daddy)
and Matthew's Gospel account of the Great Commission. Jesus tells us to baptize in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Teach them to observe all he taught us. He will be with us always. This celebration is misunderstood by most of us. In it we are supposed to come to an understanding of the Church's encounter with God as Three in One. That God is in essence One, and experienced in Three distinct persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
This is a preacer's nightmare to try to say or bring anything new to anyone listening. The Church's theologians have tried to explain the nature of God, in God's own self. How do you distinguished divinity from divinity? Why doesn't that make God just Three? How can God be Three in One?
Most preachers end up talking about the inner relationship of God with God's self. The Father speaks the Word, the Son. The Son spoken in love obeys the will of the Father and shows the love of the Father to his friends. The Holy Spirit is the love relationship between Father and Son, poured out on the Church and World, bringing people into deeper relationship with God.
Saint Patrick by legend explained the Trinity with the three leaves of the Shamrock.
Modern Theologians sometimes use other terms as their understanding grows. Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier. Discribing God by the ways experienced by people in relationship to God.
I prefer to take an artist's approach to understanding the Trinity God. Andrei Rublev, a Russian Orthodox Monk, painted a scene based on the life of Abraham and Sarah. One sees three people sitting peacefully, attending one to the others. And in front of the table at which they sit is an open space. Rublev leaves a place in the interplay of this mystery for us. We are invited into the reality of perfect love, respect, and self offering for others.
This past Sunday the New York Times reported on the flack the Obamas were cathching for their recent Date Night in New York. What did it cost? It is easy to be romantic when you can order up a big jet, many limos, and the best seats in any house, anywhere, while your mother-in-law watches the kids. And why does he have to make the rest of us look so bad?
The flack was about the Obamas still being a romantic, middle age couple, fully engaged and interested in work, family and each other.
We are jealous and just don't get it. It is about desire, interest willingness to engage outside ourselves with others. Somehow, there is an image mirrored between the Holy Trinity and the love expressed in committed relationship.
Sunday at a Graduation for several graduates, I was talking with a husband and wife couple who joked about being completely opposite each other. These two have easily been married between 30 and 40 years. Their differences seem to bring life to their relationship. But the relationship is based in respect, love and committment.
The priest who preached at the mass I attended, mentioned the deep lowliness he had felt at the lowest point of his life. He had come to admit his addiction to alcohol and saw the pain it had caused him and people who loved him. He told how each of us at some point all of us come to the point of great loneliness and even feel that God has gone away.
Am I looking for that place at the table with the Persons of the Trinity? What connections am I looking for? What relationship do I operate out of and find deepest life within?
What evidence of that relationship is visible in my daily life?
