Trinity Sunday
We like to belong. We like to belong to a family, to a parish, to a community. No one is an island. We cannot bear isolation. It is not good to be alone. No one wants to feel as an outsider. We all want to belong. It is in our nature to be drawn to community. Today's feast celebrates the fact that the God we follow is a community of persons.
When we pray daily, we remind ourselves of this fact, that our God 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 quite 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 Christian community, at different points in its history, experienced God as Loving Father, as Loving Brother and as energising and Loving Spirit.
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 have found the following analogy 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 have used this little image here before:
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.