Trinity Sunday 2020.
The God of “tenderness and compassion” (Exodus 34:6) is a God that we Christians have experienced as the Holy Trinity – three persons in one God. Through our initiation into the family of believers we are intimately related to the Father/Mother God through Jesus with whom God is one, and to the Spirit who proceeds from both, a love bond, a perfect communion.
God, the ultimate ground of all that exists, is a community and where there is a community there is communion or oneness. Everywhere we look in our world, among humans and among the other-than-human creatures, we find communion, a communion that leads to a oneness. Eating food is a communion event that brings about oneness between the one eating and the food being consumed. Remembering is a communion event that can bring about a oneness between the present reality and the past. Worshipping God is a communion event that can deepen the oneness that exists between God, us and all creation.
Our scientists refer to the Universe as a single energy event, as a cosmic communion in which everything in the Universe is present to everything else in the Universe. We humans are “made in the image of God”, yet all of creation images God and carries the divine presence and purpose. Every being in our Universe has its own voice that speaks of the Ultimate Mystery out of which it came and within which it exists.
No matter where we look – up into the universe, out into this world or inside our own hearts, we can sense the presence of the three in one God. In every dimension of our existence God reveals Godself to us, sharing with us God’s life and drawing us into God’s love communion.
To exist is to exist in communion and in oneness. In honouring the Trinity, we are called to value, nurture and celebrate this communion and oneness. In this way we grow in wonder and in our love relationship with our tender and compassionate God (the Creator, Saviour and Sustainer), and we come to experience a cosmic communion.
I don’t think we will be questioned at the pearly gates about what we know about the Mystery of the Trinity! What is important is that through the ups and downs of our daily life, we open ourselves to encounter the God who loves, the God who saves, the God who inspires, the God who invites us and all creation into a living, benevolent relationship.
In the words of Saint Paul’s Trinitarian Blessing: “May the grace of Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with [us] all” (2 Corinthians 13:13).
Therese McGarry rsj