Blessed Feast of the Holy Trinity!

Reflection for the Feast of the Holy Trinity, 2023

There are few mysteries in our faith that are as difficult to comprehend as the Mystery of the Holy Trinity. We have nothing in our experience with which to compare it, no frame of reference to explain how there is One God, three distinct Persons. Many beautiful volumes have been written about this Mystery, but after all, it remains–a Mystery. Of Faith.

There are, however, many things in life that are mysteries. After 72 years of marriage, a man still can’t say how he knew this woman was THE ONE. A woman who has been a teacher in a tiny rural school for 50 years, often without textbooks or supplies, tells anyone who will listen that she has found herself at home all these years in the classroom and wouldn’t change a thing about it. A composer who has stunned his audience with an orchestral masterpiece that expresses the beauty of the human spirit in the midst of the tragedy of war can’t begin to explain where the music came from or how he got it down on paper. And the husband and wife who were so anxious about having a seventh child when they have both lost their jobs, weep with gratitude and love the first moment they gaze into the eyes of their precious tiny daughter. It’s all a Mystery. Of Life.

Faith and life. Two Mysteries full of impossibility, and yet they are what make the soul of a human being unique among every other creature under the sun, and we often take them in without a conscious thought.

So is the Mystery of the Holy Trinity: the Father Who created us, The Son Who redeems us, and the Holy Spirit Who makes us holy. Little children in religion class eat it up, and sing songs about this Mystery. Do they understand it? “YES!” they will tell you at the top of their lungs.  And in some unfathomable way they do, just as we understand love, and vocation, and music and the beauty of a newborn child. We believe because it has been told to us all our lives, and we want to believe it. We assent to it. The Holy Trinity speaks to a part of us we cannot touch, but where truth makes its home.  Maybe it’s a matter of survival for us. Maybe it’s the fulfillment of the best part of our being.  Maybe after all we have to believe it. It is a Mystery. Of Love.

Maybe, just maybe the Mystery of the Holy Trinity, the Indwelling of the Godhead within our souls, is the last hope we have of believing in our own creation, our on-going redemption and our final sanctification.

And that may be, in the end, all we need to know.

Blessed Feast of the Holy Trinity.