Trinity Sunday

TRINITY OF LOVE

The feast of the Holy Trinity reminds us that God is beyond our capacity to fully understand or to control. We recall that at the centre of all life there are three loving divine Persons in the one God.

Naturally, we tend to make our self the centre of our life. When we accommodate God, we do so often for our own convenience. We try to domesticate God, so that we can cope with him like a little house-god and use him for our own purposes.

Jesus taught us to ask God our Father for all our needs. But we must be careful that we don’t make God merely a handy means to our ends: the family doctor when we are ill, the insurance agent for our economic security, the handyman when we need something fixed, a pocket handkerchief, readily available. Let’s not relegate God to our payroll so that we can pay him off and still make a profit with a clear conscience.

God is domesticated, but not like that. He doesn't live in a niche in our home; rather, we belong to his household. God is a family of three Persons, a Trinity in love. Only the family of the Trinity makes sense of the human family. Only the loving Trinity makes sense of our need to love and to be loved.

"No one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him" (Matt 11:27). God the Son has revealed to us that he is a member of the community or family of persons in the Trinity, where love is given and received at the very source of love. As Jesus Christ, he is the head of every family and community. All genuine human love shares in Christ-love. Unselfish love is the created expression of the Holy Spirit, who is the unconditional love of the Father and the Son. God is the source and centre of our life and of all creation.

God loves us not because we are lovable but because his nature is to love without conditions attached. He says, "I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you. I shall remove the heart of stone from your bodies and give you a heart of flesh instead...You shall be my people and I shall be your God (Ezech 36:25-27)... I am not doing this for your sake ... but for the sake of my holy name which you have profaned" (Ezech 36:22).

God's coming to us and his presence among us are his free decision, based on his love freely poured out. His coming is bound to his promise, not to our works of virtue. God is thrust onward by his love; he is not necessarily attracted by our beauty. He comes even in moments when we have done nothing of note, when we have done everything wrong, when we have deliberately sinned against his will for us.

Our Christian lives are marked over and over with the sign of the Trinity, from baptism until the last anointing, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. But we may wonder: where are there any signs of the active presence of the Blessed Trinity in our lives?

We should be always looking for signs of the Trinity. There is a glimmer of God the Father in the grandeur of the universe: the power, the harmony, the simplicity and the complexity of his creation. God the Son is glimpsed in the love that we see in human beings: the generosity, the patience, the kindness, the sensitivity, the delicacy, the forgiveness. God the Holy Spirit is revealed in the unselfish love that we occasionally glimpse in ourselves: the loyalty, the creativity, the energy, and the recuperative powers.

In today’s second reading, St Paul tells the Romans: "The love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been given to us" (Rom 5:5). When we tap this inner source of love, it transforms our lives.

The Trinity is within each of us, bursting with creative energy. Let us stop trying to make a little house-god out of the Trinity and give ourselves over to the wonder of God in our prayer and in our ordinary activities.

The Trinity is here. God is with us. His plans for us are infinitely better than ours. Let us pray always in the spirit of Jesus to God the Father: “Your will be done.” Let him have his way with us.