Dt 4:32-24, 39-40
Ps 33:4-5,6,9,18-19, 20,22
Rom 8:14-17
Mt 28:16-20
The Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity compels us to consider the most important truth of our faith. We recall this truth every time we begin and end Mass. We invoke the Trinity every time we pray. We call upon the Trinity whenever we say the words: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. What we call the Trinitarian formula is critical to every sacrament we celebrate from baptism to the anointing of the sick and dying. The sign of the cross with the Trinitarian formula begins and ends everything the Church does. As it should. We read in The Catechism of the Catholic Church, “Christians are baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. "
Catholics are NEVER to be baptized by a priest using the bizarre formula: in the name of the Creator, the Redeemer and the Sanctifier as those of a certain persuasion would like. Indeed, if that formula is used for baptism it is invalid and the child must be baptized again. This is as it should be.
The Catechism continues, "The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity
is the central mystery of Christian faith and life. It is the mystery of God in himself. . . .It is therefore the source of all the other mysteries of faith . . . (It is) the light that enlightens them. . . . It is the most fundamental and essential teaching in the hierarchy of the truths of faith.” Every time we make the sign of the cross, we recall a mystery that is inexplicable. The Trinity remains inexplicable despite the vast number of books written about it. Though each book may contain a bit of insight into the nature of the Trinity, no book captures the essence of the Trinity. No book, or the sum of all books, will ever capture that full essence. In the end, the dogma of the Trinity depends on faith and faith alone.
A dictionary defines faith as: “Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence.” That definition complements the one from the Letter to the Hebrews: “Faith is the conviction of things unseen.” We must become comfortable with the definition of faith as mysterious because despite the absence of logical proof, despite the impossibility of philosophy or science to explain the Trinity, one cannot call oneself Christian if he or she denies the Trinity. Father. Son. Holy Spirit.
Many of you probably heard the legend that I did back in grade school a lot of decades ago. It still serves to illustrate the impossibility of understanding the dogma of the Trinity.
The great theologian and philosopher St. Augustine was walking along a beach trying to understand One God in Three Divine Persons. He wanted to explain the Trinity through logic. He noticed that a little boy had dug a hole in the sand and was walking back and forth between the water and the hole with a seashell filled with seawater. He would fill the shell at the water’s edge and then empty it into the hole in the sand. Augustine observed this for a while and then moved closer and asked what he was doing. The boy responded that he was emptying the sea into the hole. Augustine asked how he could expect to empty something as vast as the sea into a small hole? The child responded, “I can empty the sea into this hole more easily than you can understand the Trinity.”
Only through faith can we understand some things that our inadequate intelligence will never be able to comprehend. Even if we were to comprehend the Trinity, the limits of human vocabulary, the ultimate emptiness of all languages, the pallid nature of similes and metaphors, would not allow us to explain it in a way that others could understand.
The word Trinity does not appear in the Bible. Rather, the understanding of the Trinity grew as the Church began to consider what Jesus had said and done during His time on earth. The doctrine of the Trinity is the doctrine that in the unity of God there are three Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. There is only One God–-yet the Persons are distinct. Thus, Jesus always speaks of His Father as distinct from Himself, yet He also notes that “I and the Father are One.” The same is true of the Holy Spirit.
Over the past weeks many of the gospels have come from Jesus' farewell discourse in John’s Gospel in which Jesus refers to both the Father and the Holy Spirit in reference to Himself several times throughout this farewell.
The Trinity is, and will remain, a mystery forever. The oft-repeated doxology: "Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be; world without end. Amen" reaffirms the fundamental truth of our faith.
It can also fuel hours of contemplation.
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The photos below are from the recent retreat we gave at Cohasset on the South Shore. Black and white is my first love in photography. The first several rolls of film I shot back in 1977 were black and white. when I went to England most of the shots were also black and white.
+Fr. Jack, SJ, MD
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