HOLY TRINITY (C)

I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now. – John 16: 12

   God’s revelation confronts us with an essential Mystery that is too expansive for our little pea brains & imaginations to contain, much less understand. To speak of God, then, means we have to stretch finite human language to the breaking point. Yet this doesn’t keep the Lord from giving what we are able to assimilate & slowly but surely leading us ever deeper into the Mystery of His nature.

   There is a poignant film entitled “There were Times, Dear” starring Joanne Woodward that tells the story of a woman who had to cope with her husband’s progressive Alzheimer’s disease. This film shows her watching him as he becomes more & more lost; she watches him become a dazed & drooling invalid; she worries when she wakes up in the morning to find him missing & she doesn’t know where he is. But she doesn’t keep her distance. She stays with him, bathes him, cares for him, & dresses him. And she does this with the knowledge that not only will he never be the same again, but there will come a point when he will not even know who she is. Yet she has no thought of divorcing him or leaving him or staying away.

   I know what that is like. When she was in the nursing home, my mother once introduced me to a fellow resident as her brother. It comes as a shock, & there is no way to prepare for it. So what does this have to do with the Trinity? Instinctively, we know that we are at our best, our most moral, our most divine, when we are in loving relationships. But why?

   Because it is at those times that our true identity is revealed, our identity as beings made in the image & likeness of the triune God, revealed precisely as a God whose very nature is a loving relationship. The Trinity tells us that God is not solitary like the pagan gods. God is not capricious or immoral like the Greek gods. No, the Trinity says that God is relationship – Father, Son, & Spirit – & the basis of that relationship is love, but a love that sets the standard for what it means for us as His creatures to love.

   So we are most godly, most divine, most happy, when we too are “Trinity.” On the flip side, we are least ourselves & most unhappy & most inhuman when we are out of sync with the Trinity in whose image we are made. The worst pain in the world is that of being utterly alone & it is sin, our sin, that puts us there. Think of the raw emotions of a betrayal, a separation, the death of a spouse or a child, a divorce. Some people commit suicide over a broken love affair. These situations hurt so much because they go against the grain of who we are.

   So the next time someone asks, “What is the Trinity all about?” simply say: “It’s about 3 persons bound up in a relationship of love that boggles the human mind – & it’s about me, because I am a reflection of that relationship. The Trinity is the basis of the moral life that urges me to show in my life the glimpse I have of God’s life: Father, Son & Spirit bound by totally unselfish love.  AMEN!