6/12/2022 - Trinity Sunday

An Invitation to Intimacy
Today we celebrate the feast of the Most Holy Trinity. Our ordinary devotion to the Holy Trinity is revealed in the Sign of the Cross, when we say: “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” The sign of the cross distinguishes us from other Christian groups. Making the sign of the cross in the Church or before we enter the church, before our prayers, shows that we are followers of the Holy Trinity, and we believe in the Trinitarian God. If we do it in public, it is an expression to the world that we believe in the Holy Trinity. It is a noble sight to see professional athletes make the sign of the cross before a game, because they profess their faith in the Blessed Trinity as if to say that without the Holy Trinity, they are nothing.

We also make the sign of the cross on our body because our body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. Touching our forehead when we say ‘in the name of the Father’ we are praying for enlightenment from God the Father. When we touch our chest when we say, ‘and of the Son’ we are asking Jesus (the second person of the Trinity) to teach us to love as he loves. And when we touch our shoulders when we say, ‘and of the Holy Spirit’ we are invoking the strength from the Spirit of God to act always guided by him. Our body is sacred because it carries the sign of the Holy Trinity and God dwells in us. Therefore, the body should not be abused and taken for granted.

Social scientists these days are pointing out the increase of spirituality in the contemporary world, a spirituality that is not only distinct but often separate from institutional religion. Many people claim to be ‘more spiritual’ than ‘church goers’ though they have no yardstick to measure the veracity of this claim. According to one author, spirituality refers to individual and personal experiences that are related to “a search for meaning, for unity, for connectedness, for transcendence, and for the highest of human potential.”  This spirituality may or may not include belief in a personal God.  Some of the people, who follow this path of spirituality-outside-religion, consider ‘god’ in terms of an energy or a universal soul. Lots of this talk of an ‘powerful impersonal universe’ has also influenced the textbooks that our children study. What could be lacking in such a position is the belief in God who is a person!
 

The feast of today, once again reminds us that the God we believe in as Christians is a person.  And therefore, we are even able to refer to Him, as ‘He’.  Going beyond the Trinity as a mere article of faith, what does this belief imply for our lives lived in the light of faith?   We will focus attention on two aspects of our belief in the Trinity. First, we did not arrive at the concept of a Trinitarian God by human search or intellectual acumen. We know it from the self-revelation of God. One of the major themes in the Hebrew Scriptures is the covenant.  God takes initiative to walk among humans, even when they tend to reject Him.  He constantly seeks them out, renews His covenant with them – with us, sets up systems to remind us of that covenant:  the Law, the Scriptures, the community, the church.

The act of creation and the establishment of the covenant are the beginnings of the revelation of the Triune God. ‘In the fullness of time’ God shares in the human form and existence. This marks the beginning of the revelation of the second person of the Trinity:  He was made visible in Jesus of Nazareth.  Again, Jesus’ mission, in his own words, was “to seek out and save what was lost” (Lk 19:10). In other words, he came to re-establish the covenantal relationship.  Moreover, Jesus would refer to God as His Father, and would teach us to address the Creator-God as “Our Father” (Mt 6:9). Thus, the relationship between human beings and God becomes even more intimate.  This is not all.  Jesus would also introduce us more tangibly to the third person of the Trinity.  He would leave the Spirit as his parting gift.

Second, our belief in the Trinity reminds us that our God is capable of intimacy and invites us into that intimacy.  This is even deeper when we see the Trinity as three persons who are mutually in love. Our belief in God is an invitation to experience. And the Trinity is the way we experience God the mystery, in His different dimensions. Our prayers, our silence, our participation in the Eucharist, must be directed to enter more deeply into an intimacy with God. With St. Paul we need to move to that state of: “In Him we live, move and have our being.’ Acts 17:28

 Fr Tom Kunnel, C.O