Sunday is Trinity Sunday
The most sublime revelation to come from the lips of Our Lord and the Scriptures is that God is three persons and yet one God. In his reflection below, Deacon Rick presents some of the ways human beings have tried to understand this by analogy. And our human wrestling with this is important, otherwise we undervalue God’s gift of human reason. But in the Trinity we need more than our own human efforts. As Aquinas and Augustine would say about this article of faith: If we understand then it is not God (Augustine); to comprehend God is impossible to any created intellect (Aquinas).
There’s more. The great American theologian, Fr. John A Hardon, S.J., follows a long line of Catholic Faith when he writes of the Trinity as Love.
But the Trinity is more than a test of our faith. It is also the perfect model of our selfless love. As revelation tells us, within the Godhead is a plurality of Persons, so that God is defined as Love because He has within His own being, to use our language, the object of love which is an Other with whom each of the Persons can share the totality of their being.
We therefore see from reflection on this Triune Love that love by its essence is not self-centered, that love unites, that love gives, and that love shares perfectly within the Godhead. Love is therefore as perfect in us as it approximates the perfect sharing that constitutes the Trinity.
