HAPPY Trinity Sunday! It’s the Solemnity of the Holy Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit
What do this feast and the dogma mean to us? How do we make sense of this mystery of our faith? In childhood, the first thing we learn about God is that He is love in a dynamic relationship of three persons.
John Foley, S.J. explains it well to us:
So Jesus promised to pour out the Holy Spirit into us. He tells us that the Spirit is God. “Everything that the Father has is mine; for this reason I told you that he [God the Spirit] will take from what is mine and declare it to you.”
Do you get the logic? Everything the Father has belongs to the Word. Everything that Jesus the Word has belongs to the Spirit. The Spirit is the third part of God, so to speak, and it bestows us and the whole earth back upon the Father, thus closing the circle.
What aliveness, what movement there is in God: speaking, reaching out, flowing forth, receiving back. God is liquid motion, a dynamism in which everything is changing always, yet always remaining the same because it is love. We are invited into that circle of love. Even in today’s difficult world.
So the most important thing to remember about this solemnity is that it calls us to enter deeply into a relationship with God and one another. It calls for genuine friendships, a united and caring community, faithful marriages, and closer family bonds. It urges us to reach out in compassion to those who feel alienated, hurt and misunderstood. It invites us not to give up on people and loved ones who disappoint us and differ from our views or perspectives.
Most of all, the mystery of the Holy Trinity calls us to relate to God in a simple and personal way by addressing him as Father, Son, and Spirit.
In his memoirs, The Spiritual Journey of a Misfit, A Personal Pilgrimage, Francis Dorff, O. Praem., who spent most of his life working in the academe, wishes that his colleagues approach their faith not too much in academic exercise but in a relationship with God’s active life stirring up inside of us. Here’s what he confesses in his memoirs addressed to God:
Later on, some of my colleagues in philosophy and theology would go in a much sophisticated direction with my attempts to tell them what you are stirring within me. With minor variations on this theme, they’d say something like, “Well, with that regard, “on one hand, with Heidegger, you could agree…On the other hand, Thomas Aquinas would argue…Or you could take Whitehead’s position and argue….” These are just a few of the options they would outline in painstaking detail. This laid the foundation for an argument or two behind which we both could safely hide. Then I’d forget that I hadn’t wanted to argue. I’d wanted to share with them you were stirring up with me.
Yes, what God is “stirring up” inside us is what this solemnity is all about. And what is stirring up in us is our longing for love, peace, unity, and order in these challenging times.
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The opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints of the Asian Journal, its management, editorial board and staff.
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Fr. Rodel “Odey” Balagtas is the pastor of Incarnation Church in Glendale, California.
