The Trinity and us

THE Solemnity of the Blessed Trinity this year is celebrated on May 22. This feast is one concrete occasion to consider once again this highest, most central and mother of the mysteries of our Christian faith.

The mystery, like the other mysteries of our faith, is supposed to forever whet our curiosity in God and to sharpen our piety, not to kill them. It is supposed to give us light and energy to know God and ourselves more intimately.

It is supposed to motor our Christian life, shape our thoughts and desires, guide our behavior, form our basic attitudes it is supposed to be the pattern of our life but this seems not to be so.

Since we are God’s children, made in his image and likeness, we should always be in vital contact with him, for without him, we are nothing. But this seems not to be so.

We seem to prefer to enter into a highly anomalous situation where we are to go about our life on our own, freed from our Father and Creator. We can
even go to the extent of removing God completely from our lives.

Before that happens, we first get entangled with treating God and
religion as a purely private affair, too personal or too intellectual to be
talked about in public. We condemn meditating the mysteries of our faith as
not practical.

The sad fact is that this mystery of the intimate life of God¡Xthat he
is
one God in three persons¡Xis hardly considered, much less appreciated.
If ever, the consideration is treated as something too special to be of
any use by anyone. This is unfortunate! This is where we are wrong!

Ignoring this mystery is like giving up our quest to know who really
are. We prefer to have our own ideas about ourselves. We don¡¦t seek our
identity in the one objective source that can truly give it.

No matter how brilliant our ideas about ourselves may be, if they
don¡¦t
conform with what God wants us to be, they mean hardly anything.

They at best can have traces of the objective truth¡Xachieved more by
accident than by intention¡Xbut detached from what our faith tells us
about ourselves, they are always mixed with errors and are therefore
dangerous.

Of course, right now, many of us impoverished by faith cannot
understand what this business about talking with God, studying theology,
meditating the mysteries are all about. They would seem like foolishness. This is the
real problem we have.

That the mystery of the Blessed Trinity is too much for us to
understand should not restrain us from considering it often. On the contrary, it
should tickle us always to consider it, getting insights and other precious
lights along the way.

This, in fact, is the basic law governing our Christian life. While
happy
and contented with the possession of many settled truths of our faith,
Christian life is forever in search of deeper truths and richer lights.

This is because the content of our faith can never be fully
comprehended. After all, it has God at its core.

And what we so far know about the Trinity is that while God is one and
absolutely one and simple¡Xthere are no parts in him¡Xhe is never
alone, but is in an eternal dynamic motion of knowing and loving¡Xhimself and his
creation.

This knowing and loving in God is so perfect that both the subject and
object of these divine operations are real persons¡Xthe Father, the Son
and the Holy Spirit¡Xand not just concepts or modes of being in God. Each
one is God.

Also, our imperfect knowledge can already reach the truth that these
divine persons do not divide the divine substance among themselves, but each
has the divine substance in its entirety. Not three Gods, but only one God.

That is the perfection of God. That is also God¡¦s deepest mystery!

And we are supposed to participate in that Trinitarian life, and to
somehow pattern ourselves to it. You can just imagine the endless possibilities
the consideration of the Trinity can have in our lives!

All these possibilities somehow are revealed to us by Christ by
showing us
how we ought to know and love God and one another, that is, giving our
all up to death.

This truth should not remain in the level of ideas or desires. It
should be translated into life, incarnated into our actions and our own selves!
That¡¦s when we truly become children of God, our ultimate identity.