Four hundred years before Christ came on earth, the Greek philosopher Plato came up with two questions he could not answer: "If there is only one God, what does he think about? For, if God is an intelligent being, he must think about something?" Plato's second question is as follows: "If there is only one God, whom does he love? Because love is central to happiness."
In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas spoke about "the misery of language" in talking about God, and Aquinas himself was no slouch when it came to language. Many Christians retain an image of God as an isolated, all powerful, individual, like the disinterested, artistic god of Joyce's Portrait, presiding over the universe, indifferent to its fate and sufferings, 'paring his fingernails'. Today's feast attempts to correct this image, to present a rounded view of the Christian God.
However, 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 foolish 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 Creator Loving Father, as Loving, Redeeming Brother and as energising, sanctifying Loving Spirit.
Today's feast, as it 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: Our God is composed of the Father who created us, His Son, the Word of God through whom the Father expresses himself, and the Spirit who binds the Father to the Son and unites us with one another and with God. We begin all our prayers in the name of the father. We conclude all our prayers to God the Father through our Lord Jesus Christ your son who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. The Trinity is built into the pattern of Christian prayer and experience.
We are all made in God's image. The love of God then, is a pattern for 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 this is the most traveled path to God. The family is our first brush with the Trinity. Through our love for one another we too participate in the life of the Triune God.
The feast we celebrate today stresses the centrality of relationships to happiness and life. God himself is composed of a three-fold relationship. God is not a cold rugged individualist but a community, of knowing and loving. God is not distant and isolated but a family bound in warm unity.
Think of the Father as the spring of life, of the Son as the river flowing from that spring and the Holy Spirit as the sea. For the spring, the river and the sea are all one nature.
It beats the wilted shamrock.
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