This is one of my favorite days of the liturgical year – the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity! I couldn’t resist sharing a short excerpt from The God Who is Love: Explaining Christianity From Its Center
Enjoy your Trinity Sunday!
The Triune God
Throughout elementary, and then high school,
everything religion teachers and ministers taught me about the Trinity could be
summed up in two points: It is a mystery, impossible to completely understand;
and the best image for it is the shamrock.
Tragically, a vast number of us
never progress further. Why is that a tragedy? Because without the understanding
of God as a Trinity of Persons, the heart of Christianity will always be elusive.
Everything progresses, everything comes into sharper focus, with the
realization that God is interiorly a
relationship of unfathomable, reciprocal Love. To arrive at this, however, we
will have to get a bit “abstract” first.
Like Judaism and Islam, Christianity begins with
the conviction that God is infinite;
His intellect and power are inexhaustible. Saying that such a Being “knows
everything in the universe” is a given.
A person of faith can go further and say that God knows all possible worlds – even different realms
of creation, such as the angelic. But again, for a Being of infinite intelligence
- not that spectacular. To say something truly breath-taking about God’s intelligence,
you would have to say…“He knows Himself, His infinite Self.”
Allow that statement to sink in. As persons, you
and I have an idea of who we are – a picture in our mind of our appearance, a
record of our past, and judgments as to strengths and weaknesses. We can flip
on the television and hear what a high priority people place on “finding themselves,”
discovering what they want out of life. I am sure you have found through
experience, however, that our self-images are often in error.
If we acknowledge that God is perfect though, then
the same has to be said for His idea of Himself. It would have to be a perfect
reflection – and more: there would be nothing in the Thinker that was not also
present in His thought of Himself. All of God’s attributes must be shared in by
His idea: His infinite power, intelligence, will, divine life - even Personhood.
Now I realize that is a lot to take in; I would recommend rereading the
paragraph a few times before continuing.
Alright, lets go one step farther now. Because God
stands outside of space and time, He has no beginning. He did not develop, did
not grow; He, and He alone, simply IS. There could never have been a time when
He was without this knowledge of Himself. So we have God and this living Thought always dwelling within
Him. I suggest taking another pause.
Now, let me come at this from a different
direction, the personalist: from eternity there is one divine Person coming
forth from Another. One divine Person, a Son, being generated by Another, His
Father. All that the Father is, He
gives; all that the Son is He receives.
The Son cannot be
apart from the Father. The Son is the One Who eternally comes forth from
Him. And this is what we find when we turn to the New Testament. There is a
slight change in terminology though. When the Son entered the human race, He
was not called the Father’s Idea, but His Word
- exactly what we call an idea that has entered the world!
The Father’s sharing of Himself with the Son is
mirrored in the Son’s return of love. As perfect Lovers, Each pours Himself out
to the Other, holding nothing of Themselves back. Their love shares in Their
very being; it is all that They are -
infinitely powerful, filled with Their intelligence, will, life. Their Love, precisely because it is Theirs, is divinely
alive, is Person – Their Holy Spirit.
“Three
Persons in one God,” is the statement traditionally used by Christianity to
define “Trinity.” We can see something of this three-in-one when we look at
ourselves; for as Judaism first taught, humanity is made in the “image and
likeness of God” (Genesis 1:27). Our existence could be said to image the
Father; our thought within us, the Son; and our capacity to demonstrate love,
proceeding as it does from both our existence and thought, the Spirit. I am an
individual being and yet these three aspects coexist in me, flow out of one
another, and complete one another. Take any one of these away and I cease to be
me. I am but a pale reflection of the Triune God – infinite Existence,
Knowledge, and Love intertwined, flowing to and from One Another.
When the New Testament says, “God is Love,” (1
John 4:8) it is not describing one of His traits, but defining His very Being!
The One God is an exchange of Love - The Father and Son giving themselves to
Each Other in the Person of the Holy Spirit.
God
the Creator
This brings us to a very interesting point: if God
is so complete, then why did He create other beings? What can an angel or a
human give Him that He does not already have, and to an infinite degree?
Nothing, absolutely nothing; He could not have created us because of anything
we could give Him. The only logical alternative is that He created to give to us, to allow us to share in the
Love that He is! That kind of generosity is beyond our human power to express.
No wonder we call the Trinity mystery!
Hebrew Scripture begins with God’s act of
creation. Pregnant within those first pages is the later recognition of God’s
Trinitarian nature: while “the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters,”
God (the Father) spoke His Word,
“Let there be…” (Genesis 1:2-3). But perhaps the most pregnant words in the Old
Testament are heard when God crowned His creation with man and woman:“Let us make
man in our image, after our
likeness”…So God created man in his own image, in the image of God He created
him; male and female he created them.
And God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:26-28).
God, Who is
a bond of Love, created us to live in His image as a bond of love! Man and woman reflect the very Oneness of God
when they “become one flesh” (Gen.2:24). Their Oneness is so real, so complete,
that oftentimes after nine months you have to give their love his or her own
name!
Man, woman, and child, living as a family, give us a glimpse of God’s inner
life.
There is a second aspect of what it means to be
created in God’s “image and likeness.” The phrase carries with it the
revelation that we were created as God’s sons and daughters.
God’s act of creation is described as forming man from the clay of the earth
and “breath[ing] into his nostrils the breath of life,” making man a “living being”
(Gen.2:7).
That “breath of life” is what we today call the
soul, spirit, or heart. To bridge the gap between His transcendence and
material creation, God created man and woman with an immaterial component. Like
all animal life, we are equipped with strong instincts and drives
(self-preservation, fight-or-flight, sex).
Unlike the rest of nature, however, we have been given a spiritual soul
to integrate these drives and channel them so as to give ourselves in love in
imitation of God’s Love. Where does the human soul receive that kind of
strength? From God dwelling in it, filling it with His Own divine Life!
The first man and woman were created as God’s son
and daughter, and as such bore a special likeness to God the Son. Like Him, we
have received all we are from the Father and are blessed with the capacity to
give ourselves back to Him. We can allow God to make a gift of Himself to us in
the Person of the Spirit (Love), and then cooperate with the Spirit as He moves
us in a return of love to the Father and a sharing of that love with our
brothers and sisters. Man and woman shared in the Life, the Love, of the
Trinity! It was that state that Scripture called Eden, Paradise – and rightly
so.
I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude
for the thoughts shared here to Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986); Gerald
O’Collins, The Tripersonal God (New
York: Paulist Press, 1984); and Scott Hahn, The
Catholic Gospel (Audiocassette Series by St. Joseph Communications).
