Dear Family,
Two months after he was elected Pope on March 13, 2013, Pope Francis said the following in a homily on Holy Trinity Sunday:
"Today is the Sunday of the Most Holy Trinity.
The light of Eastertide and of Pentecost renews in us every year the joy and amazement of faith.
Let us recognize that God is not something vague, our God is not a God “spray,” he is tangible.
He is not abstract but has a name: “God is love”.
His is not a sentimental, emotional kind of love but
the love of the Father who is the origin of all life,
the love of the Son who dies on the Cross and is raised,
the love of the Spirit who renews human beings and the world.
Thinking that God is love does us so much good, because it teaches us to love,
to give ourselves to others as Jesus gave himself to us and walks with us.
Jesus walks beside us on the road through life."
A commentator at the time, Father Andy Alexander, SJ, added: “We can celebrate this great solemnity, not by thinking about or arguing about concepts about how the Trinity works, but by opening our hearts to a deeper relationship with our God, who is love. We can have a relationship with each of the Persons in the Trinity.”
My personal images are God the Creator, God the Redeemer, God the Enlivener. As I said last Sunday, Pentecost is a celebration of my own holy Energizer Bunny. That is not a profound theological insight, but it is a way for me to understand how God’s Spirit works in me.
And now, today, we celebrate God’s action as love among us. As Pope Francis said, we do that because that is God’s name: God is love.
Since you are dealing with my bunny, here is another piece of very non-theological knowledge. Did you know that Three-In-One oil was invented in 1894 to, “clean off grime, lubricate moving parts, penetrate rust?” I just looked that up.
I knew about the lubrication, but I don’t think I’ve ever used 3 in 1 to clean grime or penetrate rust. How about that for an approach to realizing how underused our relationship of love with the Trinity really is?
Maybe if Thomas Aquinas had 3 in 1, he might buy in to my thinking. After all, what better than love cleans up the grime of abused relationships or penetrates rusty closed hearts?
Let me offer some quotes from the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC to its friends.)
The Trinity is “the central mystery of Christian faith and life...[and is] the source of all the other mysteries of faith” (CCC 234). The whole of the Church’s life flows from the central belief that the one true God exists as three divine Persons — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Since the very beginning of time, God has gradually revealed and communicated the truth of who he is ...through what he has done in salvation history (see CCC 53-67). Although God gradually revealed himself throughout salvation history, mankind had no way of knowing the full truth of God’s inner life before Christ, ...before the Incarnation of God’s Son and the sending of the Holy Spirit” (CCC 237).
So... there you are. All you ever wanted to know about the Trinity. Come Holy Spirit, indeed!
May we always be In the Father, Son and Holy Spirit... P.S. Do we have a Stamp collector in the house?
