TRINITARIAN LIFE

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SOLEMNITY OF THE MOST TRINITY - C

John 16:12-15

God is one and God is three.  That is the shortest definition of the Trinity.  One in substance yet three in Persons.  Very simple yet very complex.   

What distinguishes a Christian from a faithful Jew or Muslim who both believe in One God, is the belief that God subsists in three persons namely the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.   The Christian doctrine of the Trinity is not just the monotheism of Judaism and Islam but a belief in God who is a communion and a family of love.  God subsists in three relationships or modalities or dynamics: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.   If God is love, the Father is the Lover, the Son is the Beloved and the Holy Spirit is shared Love.  We express this belief every time we make the sign of the cross and whenever we pray the Glory be to the Father, and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit….

Benedict XVI says “I believe in one God is a subversive statement which disempowers all claimants to deity.  No president, no prime minister, no culture, no country, no ideology is God.  The Church is the vehicle by which this One God wants to draw all peoples to unity within Himself” (quoted by Fr. Robert Barron in Christianity Series).  It is also subversive in a sense that the founders of other religions cannot claim to be God: not Buddha, not Confucius, not Mohammad!

We believe that this One God revealed Himself as the Trinity in pilgrimage with His pilgrim people towards Himself.  The whole economy of salvation is nothing but the unfolding of God in a progressive and continuous revelation of His being to us.  But the human mind can comprehend only so little that we find ourselves inarticulate to express the inexhaustible mystery of God.  The God we believe in is the God who reveals Himself in being hidden and at the same time hides in being revealed. 

If the Trinity is a communion of three Persons in love, the sharing of that communion overflows into creation.  In this self-communication of God, He enters into a relationship with His creatures particularly with man who is called the imago Trinitatis (the image of the Trinity).   Here we understand the Father as the Creator, the Son as the Redeemer  and the Holy Spirit as the Sanctifier.   We can only understand the Trinity through their functions, namely what they do in relations to us, otherwise we can never understand them in terms of their essence or  substance.  The best theologians of the Church have been groping with terminologies in the quest to comprehend the Christian doctrine which is expressed using Greek philosophical terms. 

The Second Person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ assumed human nature and became a pilgrim God-man who introduced to man a new of relating with God.  The mission of Jesus is not just to reveal to us the three persons of the Trinity but to bring us into the Trinitarian life, like Mary who is the Daughter of the Father, the Mother of the Son and the Spouse of the Holy Spirit.

When we were baptized, we received the indelible but invisible mark of the Trinity: we became children of God the Father, Jesus became our personal Saviour and the Holy Spirit became our Paraclete.  We have entered into a communion of divine fellowship with the One God.   In this communion, we became part of the Mystery, we became  members of the Divine Family.  Because God is love,  God is our lover, we are His beloved and He loves us with unconditional love.  On our part we are called “to love God with all our heart, with all our soul, with our might” (Dt. 6:4). 

Let us ask Mary, our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity to bring us into the fulness of the Trinitarian life....

To know more about the SOLT (Society of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity), please visit our website: http://www.societyofourlady.net/