Homily for Trinity Sunday, 2005.
When we pray daily, we remind ourselves that we are in relationship with a triune God, of God who is not an individual but a community of three persons: at Baptism, we were baptised explicitly in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Daily we bless ourselves in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. We sign off on our prayers, so to speak, by giving glory to the Father, to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. In our Christian lives then, we are steeped in this doctrine of the Trinity, from the cradle to the grave we remind ourselves of it. Of course the basis for this conviction of the entire Christian community is obvious enough from today's gospel. Jesus refers explicitly to the intimate relationship he has with the Father; in addition he makes a very clear promise that, when he has departed, he will send the Spirit, the Advocate, who will lead the community towards the complete truth.
The Church and its theologians set about making sense of this apparent conundrum for its members. And they pressed into service the language and categories of both ancient and medieval philosophers. And this language was arcane and inaccessible, and I suspect it was so even when it was first pressed into service to give some window into the mystery of the Trinity. 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 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 Loving Father, as Loving Brother and as energising and Loving Spirit. Trinity Sunday is the beginning of Ordinary Time in the Church calendar. So today's feast tries go gather up in summary what we have been celebrating over the last couple on months: 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 keeps the show on the road, as it were, through dwelling 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 Trinity tells us that we are called to live in community, and that our ultimate destiny is with the divine community. 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 also 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. I came across an analogy in a magazine during the week that some of you may find helpful in approaching this Christian mystery. It is a reflection by a mother on the many hats that she is forced to wear in the course of her experienced life. It reads as follows:
I am a daughter, a wife and a mother; three things, yet I am one totality.
To my parents, I would always be their child,
To my husband, a companion and mate,
to my children, the one who gave them birth and nurtured them to the adult state.
I seem to each of them a different person;
They each know a different type of 'me',
But I am one, within myself a trinity,
and each of them finds unity in me.