It's a day to reflect on mystery. The Trinity is not totally outside our comprehension, although we can never fully reach the depths because it is supernatural, i.e., above nature. Our intellects are too small for it. Things in nature point to its reality and meaning, however. How can three persons be one?
Nature gives us a hint. For example a cell, the building block of life, has different elements that have different jobs. But it is only one cell. Atoms, which are even smaller, have, in fact, three basic element (with rare exceptions): protons, neutrons, and electrons.
In the film about St. Joseph of Cupertino, Joseph explains the Trinity to the bishop using a blanket with three folds.
We will never fully understand the Trinity until we stand before God and He reveals it in its fullness, but he points us to it in many ways, particularly through the family, the little domestic Church. It makes perfect sense that God is a relationship of persons, because there is no such thing as love without a lover and a beloved and between them they create a new life, their love with skin on, the precious baby.
A blessed Holy Trinity Sunday and may we all come to love each of the Three Persons and thank them for acting in our lives through creation, redemption, and inspiration. Spread the good news. God is love and He loves us to a depth we can never plummet.
When it comes to the Mysteries of the Faith, I have always accepted incomprehension about them from the perspective that we are creatures, not the Creator; we live (for now) in time rather than eternity; we are finite, while God is infinite; our domain is confined to earth, while God's domain is literally infinite - there is no end; our spirit is confined to our body, God is pure Spirit. IOW ... we have no possible frame of reference to understand these higher Truths. To think that we should, or even can, is to profess that "we can be like unto God". Not me - I don't want that. I prefer to be creature, rather than creator. I much respect simple St. Joseph of Cuppertino, and St. Joseph is who he is because he lives as God intended Him to - within his simple and profound faith as a child.
ReplyDeleteAs the healthy and Catholic saying goes: "God is God; I am not God; thanks be to God".
One way that I understand the Trinity (not sure if this is valid according to Church Teaching or not) is to compare it to the "one flesh" of marriage. God himself established this Truth: "Genesis 2:24,Matthew 19:5,Mark 10:8,Ephesians 5:31".
For instance Matt 19: 4-6 -
4 Who answering, said to them: Have ye not read, that he who made man from the beginning, Made them male and female? And he said:
5 For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they two shall be in one flesh.
6 Therefore now they are not two, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.
Just as we take literally the miraculous Word of God Himself that "This.Is.My.Body"; so also "two shall be one flesh ... let no man put asunder".
These miracles (and all similar) are in the realm of the infinite, beyond our human imagination. They are explained to us by our merciful God, who want us to know as much as we need to know now while we see in this physical world as in a glass darkly ... until one day we will see Him Face to face and know Him just as we are know (I Cor 13:12) - the definition of heaven, the Beatific Vision.
Heaven is for knowing. Earth is for believing.