Like all feasts of the Church, the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity tells us something about God’s nature and His relationship to humanity – and in turn tells us something about ourselves as well.
The doctrine on the Trinity, which today’s feast celebrates reminds us that God has revealed His innermost secret: at His most basic level of being, though God is one, He is a community of persons.
God is a dynamic relationship. We say ‘God is Love,’ and rightly so, for that is what He is, but we don’t mean that He is the concept or the idea of love; we mean that He is in fact, in essence, love in action: an exchange of love.
The Trinity is God’s self-revelation that He is the Father who gazes upon the Son, the Son who beholds the Father, and the Spirit, the love that emanates from and unites them.
Today’s feast also tells us that by virtue of God being this exchange of love, God relates to His people through a sharing of this love. In the first reading, God describes himself to Moses, saying: “The Lord, the Lord, a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger and rich in kindness and fidelity.”
And in the Gospel, St. John explains that God’s love for the world was so great “that He gave His only Son so that everyone who believes in Him might not perish but might have eternal life.”
Our belief in the Trinity, and our celebration of that belief today, affirms that “it belongs to God’s very nature to be committed to humanity - that God’s covenant with us is irreversible - that God’s face is unchangingly turned towards us in love, and that God’s presence in our lives is utterly reliable and constant.”
These are all things that today’s celebration of the Trinity tells us about God. But in telling us these things about God the doctrine of the Trinity explains the truth of human nature as well.
If we believe, as we do, that humans are created in the image and likeness of God, and God is in essence a communion, a relationship of love, then we must recognize that God has destined us to share in the exchange of love that defines His very existence.
God’s self-revelation of His Triune nature is a revelation about true human nature as well: we are meant for communion, with God and with one another.
This runs counter to one of the deepest and most pervasive errors of our time: the error of radical individualism. Perhaps more than at any other time in history, and perhaps in our modern American culture more than in any other culture, we live as if we are islands unto ourselves.
We have taken the truth of our individuality, and the truth of our human freedom and so exaggerated them that we delude ourselves into thinking that we are autonomous – the independent centers of our own little universes.
We create our own realities, our own definitions of right and wrong. We are not willing to give in on our wants and needs and only enter into relationship when we think it’s to our advantage. Even in the crisis of marriage, and the crisis of vocations to religious life, we can see proof of an individualism that is unable to subordinate one’s own needs and wants to the demands of living in communion with the other. To a frightening degree, we are forgetting how to live for others and how to strive for unity with ‘the other.’
The great sadness of all this is that while the shelves at the bookstore fill with more and more books about how to fulfill the self, our belief in the Trinity provides us with the real answer we are searching for.
The more that we are in touch with who we are at the deepest level of our being – that is, a beloved child of God, made in the image and likeness of the Triune God – then the more we realize the necessity of opening ourselves to others the way God Himself has done.
When we open ourselves in this way, the ‘I’ and ‘me’ of individualism is united with the ‘thou’ of another person in such a way that the encounter creates a whole new reality: the ‘we’ that can only exist in a unity of persons.
Think of great friendships, and communities – think of successful sports teams . . . you know the old expression: there’s no ‘I” in ‘TEAM’. . . think especially of holy marriages, in which the ‘I’ of the ego is subordinated to the ‘we’ of faithful relationship in such a way that the couple becomes what they are called to be: an icon of the Triune God.
“The more we are able to enter into different kinds of deeply personal relationships, the more we will be able to encounter God who Has revealed Himself as a community of relationships.” Thus St. Augustine has said “if you see love, you see the Trinity.”
That’s why in today’s second reading St. Paul instructs the Christian community in Corinth to “encourage one another, agree with one another, live in peace.” Our belief in the Trinity is not just about who we believe God to be. It is about who we are, and how we are meant to live. The Trinity calls us out of individualism into a solidarity with others that can only grow out of the type of self-giving that God shows us by giving us His only Son, and which Jesus shows us by His trusting submission to the Father.
We pray to the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit, in order that we might be drawn out of ourselves into deeper communion with Him and with one another, and so become who were created to be from the beginning.
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