My Dear Friends:
Today we celebrate the Most Holy Trinity. One does not have to be a theologian with multiple degrees to grasp this mystery. The Church Fathers help us to understand the mystery of God in very simple ways. They did this to combat the heresies that sprung up in the early centuries of the Church but let us look upon the Trinity today in terms of relationship: how the Father, the Son, and Spirit relate to each other. We are drawn into this mystery of love that is God himself.
One of the greatest Church fathers in recent times was Pope Benedict XVI who had a gift of explaining the transcendent in very simple terms. On this feast 17 years ago, he gave a beautiful reflection on the Holy Trinity:
Today we contemplate the Most Holy Trinity as Jesus introduced us to it. He revealed to us that God is love “not in the oneness of a single Person, but in the Trinity of one substance” (Preface). He is the Creator and merciful Father; he is the Only-Begotten Son, eternal Wisdom incarnate, who died and rose for us; he is the Holy Spirit who moves all things, cosmos and history, toward their final, full recapitulation. Three Persons who are one God because the Father is love, the Son is love, the Spirit is love. God is wholly and only love, the purest, infinite and eternal love. He does not live in splendid solitude but rather is an inexhaustible source of life that is ceaselessly given and communicated. To a certain extent we can perceive this by observing both the macro-universe: our earth, the planets, the stars, the galaxies; and the micro-universe: cells, atoms, elementary particles. The “name” of the Blessed Trinity is, in a certain sense, imprinted upon all things because all that exists, down to the last particle, is in relation; in this way we catch a glimpse of God as relationship and ultimately, Creator Love.
All things derive from love, aspire to love and move impelled by love, though naturally with varying degrees of awareness and freedom. “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” (Ps 8: 1) the Psalmist exclaims. In speaking of the “name”, the Bible refers to God himself, his truest identity. It is an identity that shines upon the whole of Creation, in which all beings for the very fact that they exist and because of the “fabric” of which they are made point to a transcendent Principle, to eternal and infinite Life which is given, in a word, to Love. “In him we live and move and have our being”, St Paul said at the Areopagus of Athens (Acts 17: 28). The strongest proof that we are made in the image of the Trinity is this: love alone makes us happy because we live in a relationship, and we live to love and to be loved. Borrowing an analogy from biology, we could say that imprinted upon his “genome”, the human being bears a profound mark of the Trinity, of God as Love.
The Virgin Mary, in her docile humility, became the handmaid of divine Love: she accepted the Father’s will and conceived the Son by the power of the Holy Spirit. In her the Almighty built a temple worthy of him and made her the model and image of the Church, mystery and house of communion for all human beings. May Mary, mirror of the Blessed Trinity, help us to grow in faith in the Trinitarian mystery.
Pope Benedict XVI, Angelus Address, 6/7/09
So, I invite you to meditate on these words of Pope Benedict, and to offer up the simple prayer to the Most Holy Trinity that we offer up multiple times when we pray the rosary:
“Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and every shall be, world without end. Amen.”
God bless you all,
