The Solemnity of Holy Trinity Homily

Holy Trinity Sunday is always the dread of seminarians and even priests. We had an entire five credit course at the seminary aimed at providing us with material for preaching so that we didn’t just say it was a mystery and sit down. I wish I could do that but this doctrine is at the height and heart of our faith as Catholics.

Sometimes I do think it would be best if I simply acknowledged the mystery and sat down. It is so difficult because the formal theology on the Trinity, while extremely interesting, is difficult to bring down to the level of practical Christian living. It seems so abstract, so foreign to our normal ways of thinking. Of all the doctrines of the Church, this seems to be the one that has the least impact on how we live our lives as Christians. We are usually content to stick with our favorite person of the Trinity and hope that he communicates well with the others.

But nothing could be further from the truth, from the reality. In reality, it is the highest teachings that that have the most impact on the lesser ones. This is preeminently true of our faith in the Most Blessed Trinity. In fact, I think that is why the Church has us celebrate this solemnity: to remind us that if understood and taken seriously, faith in the Holy Trinity has a tremendous impact on how we see the world and how we live our lives as Christians in the here and now.

We believe that God is not solitary, that at the source of reality, of the universe, is not an aloneness or an impersonal force. Rather, we believe that the one and only God is an eternal exchange of life and love and that that exchange of life and love spills over into creation and into us. God has revealed his innermost secret: that at the source of reality, God is a family or communion of persons, eternal self-giving and fruitfulness. The Father communicates the entire divine nature, except “being the Father,” to the Son, the Son reciprocates the gift and the love between the two is itself a person, the Holy Spirit.

By ourselves, by our reason, we can know THAT God is, that he exists and even that he is One. But by ourselves, we cannot know WHO God is. That he has to reveal, stoop down, so to speak, and teach us. Because he has “let us in,” we are able to know him and thus we are able to be in relationship with him; we are able to cry out Abba Father! as sons and daughters.

This should change everything, our worldview and our life. I would like to point out three ways that this should be so.

First, this belief is the source of an especially Catholic way of seeing the world. Because God is both one in essence and a family of persons, both one and many, both unity and diversity, both infinite and personal, both truth and love, both community and individuals we should always be a “BOTH/AND” type of people. In God, all these things are unified. In our lives they are in tension, and usually separated by sin and sloppy thinking. As a redeemed people, who belong to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, One God in Three Persons, we have the task to reunite within ourselves, through God’s grace, those things so easily separated: the one and the many, unity of faith and diversity of gifts, body and soul, faith and reason, the human and the divine, the institutional Church and the people of God, respect for the individual and the common good, firmness and gentleness, truth and love and the list goes on and on. It is this type of thinking, this BOTH/AND thinking that makes us such outcasts in the current political process and scene. Have you noticed how one-sided and crazy things seem to us and how we never quite fit in? It is faith in the Trinity that flows down into our thinking and makes us sane!

Second, because the One God is a Trinity of Persons human life and salvation is inherently communal in nature. Because the source of reality is a communion of persons, so too is the human race, so too is the Church. In other words, God forms a human family in creation and in salvation history because that is what God is. Family is what God does, because that is what God is. This, of course, has huge implications. It means that we are not merely saved as individuals but are always save within the community, within the ecclesia. We are saved because we are incorporated, either implicitly or explicitly, into God’s covenantal family, the Church. The subject of salvation is God’s family, the Church. If we are saved, it is because we belong to her.

Thus, the goal of the Church’s ministry can never be simply about individuals. It has to be about the formation of the community and a culture: a family that worships God in the unity of faith with all of our individual differences and gifts. From this flows the importance of marriage and family, that primordial community that is at the foundation of creation, the Church and society. The Church will never abandon the importance of marriage and family in any of these sectors as it is tied up with our very identity flowing from the Trinity. In other words, if the source of reality is a Family, the source of the Church and broader society is the family. If marriage and family fail, we fail.

Third, if God is an eternal exchange of life and love then at the source of reality is self-giving fruitfulness, not individual selfishness or strife. Since creation and especially the human person are meant to “image” God, we are called to live that same type of self-giving love. His self-giving fruitfulness is meant to “spill over” into our lives so that we can live as God lives, and be our true selves. How does one do this? By living for the other, by spending ourselves, our gifts, resources, time, energies, sorrows, joys for the Other and the other. If we give ourselves to God, we are able to then truly give ourselves to others.

Our ways of thinking and living are supposed to flow from the fact that God is an eternal exchange of life and love, to mirror that reality within ourselves, the Church and society. Our world has a desperate need to hear such good news! It is not something we can keep to ourselves. But first, we need to contemplate this, to incorporate it into our worldview, the way we see the Church and the world. Then, like God, it will “spill over” into all those that we meet.