The Feast of the Trinity calls on us to honor our God whom John defined as Love.

Sunday, 5/31/15

Today is the Feast of the Blessed Trinity. We all learned that “The Trinity is the mystery of three persons in one God.”

But, in saying we know that, just what do we know? Not much.

We would be better off trying to learn about the Trinity by consulting the answer of the second question in the old catechism. Remember: the first question was, “Who made you?” The answer was, “God made me.”

The second question was, “Why did God make me?” and the answer  was: “God made me to know him, to love him, and to serve him in this world, and to be happy with him forever in the next.”  

So, before all else, we were put in this world to know God. And, unfortunately, we come a million miles short of knowing God when we are only able to recite that little jingle that says, “The Trinity is the mystery of three persons in one God.”

The mystery of the Trinity is a deep pool into which we must dive a hundred times a day, plunging ever deeper to reach a fuller knowledge of God.

St. Thomas Aquinas gave us a start into our plunging into the mystery of God. He explained that God from all eternity fixed his attention on his own being, and that resulting fixed Idea of himself is what we call the Second Person, or the Son.

The two Persons’ mutual unchanging love is the Third Person. That sounds odd, but St. John tells us, “God is love.”

(In speaking of the three Persons we should not consider those persons as distinct individuals. A Latin per-sona was a mask through which the actor would sound through in different roles.)

Then, too, we can know something of God by looking at ourselves and at the world God created.

That is because genuine love cannot be contained, and must be outgoing. God appreciates the beauty he sees in himself, and his generosity forces him to give us little shares of himself.

In looking at the world we are looking at what God’s goodness drove him to share with us.