Of all Sundays in the year, this is the one that most priests dread. In fact its a bit of an in-joke among the clergy. In fact, it is a saying among clergymen, when faced with particularly difficult situation: "I'd prefer to preach on Trinity Sunday." Before coming to Galway I worked in a parish in Dublin. Every Monday the priests of Meath Street, James' Street, Francis Street, Dolphin's Barn and Donore Avenue used gather for dinner and a few drinks at the West County Hotel. The main object of the exercise was recreation and a healthy exchange of gossip. But, as sometimes happens, there were some scrupulous men in our company. They did not think it right that the clergy of the South Inner City should be appeasing mammon in this manner. So we were forced to appease the scrupulous instead. This would be done by a volunteer delivering a short fifteen-minute paper before the meal on some improving theological topic. Then this matter could be discussed, and digested I suppose, in the course of the meal. In that way our time wouldn't be entirely wasted. If you felt you hadn't done justice to your topic, you had the option of taking it up again the following week. We endured this practice for about four weeks. The Parish Priest of James' Street at the time was a charming man called Oliver Crotty. I have often spoken about him here in this church. He was like an Old Testament prophet, over six feet tall with a long flowing beard. The kids around the place nicknamed him "The Ayatollah Kilmainaham". He was regarded as the trouble-shooter in the archdiocese. Whenever the parish priest was fighting with the curates, the Archbishop sent in Crotty to knock heads together. Crotty tired easily of tedious theology. Like Myles na gCopalleen, he judged that 'there were alternative ways of spending a day.' When his turn came to address the group, he took as his topic the Blessed Trinity. The following week, he punished us with the most obscure ramblings I had ever heard. And he went on for a full seventy-five minutes. The Parish Priest of Francis Street was in the habit of wearing a wig. His cover was blown when he nodded off to sleep. I presume that Crotty lifted the stuff straight from some late 19th century Catholic Encyclopaedia. Needless to say, it served to improve neither our theology or our meal; and that of course was the intention. Crotty set out to sabotage the practice and he succeeded. And the most suitable weapon to hand was the Blessed Trinity. That was the last time anyone was ever asked again to address the group. From then on, we concentrated on the gossip, the meal and the drinks.

But this feast is not primarily about how our God is perceived intellectually; it celebrates how our God has been experienced emotionally by our ancestors and how he continues to be experienced today by the Christian community. The Trinity is not about our understanding of God. The Christian church has never been stupid enough to lay claim to an understanding of God! Like all religious mysteries, the challenge is not to solve it, but to celebrate it. The doctrine of the Trinity is primarily a statement about the Christian experience of God. The Christian community, at different points in its history, experienced God as Loving Father, as Loving Brother and as energising and Loving Spirit. Trinity Sunday is the final feast of the Easter Season. Next Sunday we taken up again what the Church calls Ordinary Time. So today's feast, as is the final feast of the Easter Season, is a summary of what God has disclosed about himself to us as he set out to save the human race through the Easter season: Our God is composed of the Father who created us, His Son, whom he sent to save us through his death and resurrection, and the Spirit who dwells in the heart of every baptised man woman and child.

The love of God then, is the basis of all human love: the love of one divine person for another is so intense and energetic as to produce a third person. The most familiar human expression of this same mysterious love is of course the human family. And it has been the consistent teaching of the Church that the human family is the most familiar path to God. That is so in the Jewish religion out of which we sprung. That is the case on our own personal experience. The family is our first brush with the Trinity. Through our love for one another we too participate in the life of the Trinity. Again, the feast of the Trinity is not a question of human understanding but of religious experience, and good experiences are celebrated. Which brings me back to the meal and the few drinks in the West County Hotel. Celebration, rather than a dour struggle towards intellectual understanding is the hallmark of the Christian life. While this is true of all Christian feast, it is pre-eminently so in the case of the Feast of the Blessed Trinity.

Home