The huge billboards put up recently by an advertising agency all over the city in Dallas got big attention. They just contained one sentence in white on a black background spelling out a striking statement from God.
“Let’s meet at my house Sunday before the game. -God.”
“What part of ‘Thou Shalt Not…’ didn’t you understand? -God.”
“We need to talk. -God.”
“My way is the highway. -God.”
“Have you read my #1 best seller? There will be a test. -God.”
“Do you have any idea where you’re going? -God.”
And my personal favorite…
“Don’t make me come down there. -God.”
Sometimes God hits the headlines even of the secular media! This Sunday is Trinity Sunday, a day when one of the central mysteries of our Catholic faith is celebrated.
Intensity Of God
It was Pope John XXII who in 1334 extended to the universal Church the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity. A thousand years earlier the great Ecumenical Councils of Nicea (325) and Constantinople (381) had defined this essential truth of the faith, that in the one Divine Nature there are three Divine Persons.
Trinity Sunday is however not so much a celebration of a doctrine but of a Family. God is not a lonely being, aloof from everything for lack of equals, a solitary who creates a world to dispel idleness. He is a Trinity of persons. He is a communion.
A family so much in love that they overflow in us and for us. We become sons and daughters of the Father, brothers and sisters of the Son and temples of the Holy Spirit. All fellowships, be it marriage, family, civil society, can be patterned on this Eternal Communion. The vitality of this God puts everything in perspective.
St. Gregory Nazianzen, one of the earlier Fathers of the Church, explains how God prepared us for the revelation of this sublime truth by the progressive revelation He provided in Sacred Scripture.
“The Old Testament proclaimed the Father clearly, but the Son more obscurely. The New Testament revealed the Son and gave us a glimpse of the divinity of the Spirit. Now the Spirit dwells among us and grants us a clearer vision of himself.”
Let Us Dance!
The Greek Fathers of the Church describe the life of the Trinity as PERICHORESIS – two Greek words, namely peri – around and choresis – dancing. They see the Trinity as three persons dancing around! Three dancers with one dance.
Though seemingly irreverent at first, this insight is very profound. A divine dance where the Father goes out to the Son and gives all – all His wisdom, power, love and life. But the Son moves out towards the Father and in turn gives him back all his wisdom, power, love and life. This mutual self-giving is the Holy Spirit, the giving and receiving between Father and Son. Their inmost being is this mutual self-giving. God is dynamic not static!
And more! The most amazing thing is that this dance of the Trinity is not simply a dance to be observed. God invites US to join the dance. God who creates invites us to share in the work of creation; God who redeems invites us to share in the work of redemption; God who sanctifies, invites us to engage in living this adventure of holiness. We are made for self-giving. Like God, our Trinity!
A Feast Of The Heart
It is a fact that there is disorder in many of our homes. More than half of marriages wind up in the divorce court. Many are the problems between parents and children. Political rhetoric usually generates more heat than light. There is disorder EVEN within ourselves.
This Feast comes to help us look at the sources of our life. It invites us to fashion our lives on them, The Family Of Love.
Sister Elizabeth of the Trinity was a Carmelite nun, contemporary to Saint Therese of Lisieux. She will be canonized in the year 2000. She fashioned all her life on the Trinity. Her act of oblation is sublime and real : “O my God, Trinity whom I adore! Help me to become utterly forgetful of self, that I may bury myself in Thee, as changeless and as calm as though my soul were already in eternity . . . O my Three, my All, my Beatitude, Infinite Solitude, Immensity wherein I lose myself! I yield myself to Thee as Thy prey. Bury Thyself in me that I may be buried in Thee, until I depart to contemplate in Thy light the abyss of Thy greatness!”
She used to say : ” I have found my heaven on earth, since heaven is God, and God is in my soul.” What wisdom!
A little boy’s prayer. “Dear God, please take care of my daddy and my mommy and my sister and my brother and my doggy and me. Oh, please take care of yourself, God. If anything happens to you, we’re gonna be in a big mess.”
I say Amen to that!