Today’s Gospel Story for the Feast of Trinity Sunday (3:16-18) reminds us that God loves the world. Most of us were taught that Trinity – Three Persons One God – is a mystery we cannot explain so we just have to believe, which is pretty much the majority report. The minority report —Trinity is a relationship we can experience and live. “So much depends on our idea of God! Yet no idea of Him, however pure and perfect, is adequate to express Him as He really is. Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him.” (Thomas Merton). We cannot reach Trinity by any process of thinking or logic. We can experience Trinity, but as this happens we find that there are no words to talk about our experience. The closest we can come is our dogmas and doctrines, and so they take on a personal and meaningful sense as descriptions of we have begun to experience in our own life.
Our belief in Trinity, three Persons one God, is a foundation of our tradition. In today’s Gospel Story we hear, “God so loved the world” — all of us, all of creation, everything — “that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life . . . that the world might be saved through him”. This passage is about Jesus’ relationship with us, which is rooted in love. Not a manipulative or controlling love, but an accepting and encouraging love. Yet, for many, it is a threat of judgement and damnation. We replace God’s love with our need for fear and judgement, a need to please God by keeping all the rules and passing judgement on others who think differently. While Jesus reached out in love for people, to seek out the lost sheep, many of us want to let the lost sheep stay lost, restrict whom he can approach, and who can approach him. We like a merciful God, as long as we can decide who God is merciful to. This is what Jesus experienced in his life among us, what he worked against, and still is working against in our day. We need the humility to understand we don’t have all the answers. There is a lot we don’t know about other’s lives, so it is important to understand each of us is in some kind of a battle that the rest of us know nothing about.
We are invited to “believe in” Jesus, a lot different from “believing about” Jesus. Every one of us can, if we choose, be open to the Spirit moving us ever more deeply to experience Trinity in our everyday living. A difficulty is finding words to describe our experience. Many people don’t know this is happening in their life because it doesn’t fit their image. As Eckhardt says, “When I seek God with something in mind, the best I get is the something I had in mind”. We have a lot of letting go to do, especially of our image and expectations of God. This is personal in the sense that we are experiencing it, but it is never just private, myself and Jesus. It includes everyone in my life at any time.
“That the world might be saved through him.” This is not about “getting to heaven”. As St John Paul II said, “Heaven is not an abstraction nor a physical place amid the clouds, but a living and personal relationship with the Holy Trinity”. Salvation, growing into the fulness we are created to be, begins in our here and now as we allow ourselves to become aware that we exist in Trinity. To greatly oversimplify, Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin understood Christ is in creation as its life-giving force, and is the end point towards which creation is moving, a unified divine whole. “God’s saving grace is actively transforming the material universe, slowly drawing all of creation into communion rather than destroying it.” Creation is an ongoing act of love. We have a response and a responsibility, which we are pretty much ignoring. Pope Leo XIV, in his encyclical on AI, reminds us that as we take this major step in technology, we need to keep our priorities straight. AI must serve humanity, not the other way around.
Trinity is not just a mystery, or dogma. It is the ongoing and life-giving relationship in which we live. By the very fact that we are alive, we live as an image of Trinity. No matter our circumstances Trinity is happening in what is. We come to an awareness of the good behind all the bad, the beauty behind all the ugliness, the love behind all fear. Really, there are no words other than One God Three Persons. “God so loves the world, and often lives this love through others.” I know a young mother lovingly caring for her teenage son who has serious cardiac issues. To me, their loving, healing, growing relationship shows the reality of Trinity as a dynamic, life-giving, healing relationship happening here and now.
In various ways Abba touches us, depending on our openness. Two things seem to stand out as we grow in our awareness of Trinity happening in our life: the increasing awareness that we are not, and can never be, alone, since Trinity is a dynamic relationship or interconnectedness of which we are a part; there is also an awareness of the importance of the people in our life, whether we like them or not. Each of us really is a means of grace to each other, a way Trinity interacts with us, which seems to be the easiest way to talk about Trinity happening in and among us in a beautifully simple way. There are no adequate words, and the dogma of Trinity takes on a profound and real meaning for us in our every day living. We are living in this dynamic, active, creative relationship. Trinity is in us, as we are in Trinity. Hard to wrap our head around, easier to keep welcoming what is in our life, and go where this takes us. Life is an ongoing revelation of Trinity. Just sayin. . .