We share some reflections from Father Dominic's homily for Trinity Sunday.
Often our tiny conception does not begin to
approach “the God, who is always greater,” the God who loves without measure
and without regret. Today’s Feast invites us to anchor and immerse ourselves in
the fullness of God. On Trinity
Sunday the Liturgy seems to indicate that our image of who God is and what is on
God’s mind is more tiny than troubled. In other words, we probably trip
more over our puny sense of God than over conflicting creedal statements or
theological considerations.
Human poverty, the mystery of our own deepest
neediness, is perhaps exactly what ultimately pulls the “curtain” back and
enables us to fix in our heart the reality of God, who is to us Father, Son and
Holy Spirit. God loves us. And yet perhaps we feel ourselves just outside God’s
fingertips, or we spend much of our lives unable to shake off what feels like
God only embracing us grudgingly and reluctantly. God has gotten tiny for many of us. But who can explain that unexpected moment when the utter
fullness of God rushes in on us, when we completely know the One in whom “we
move and live and have our being”?
I suggest that the question before us this
morning is not how “three are one,” but rather are we poor enough to really know that He is with us always, ever
approaching and addressing us until the end of the world? Are we poor enough to
be plunged into Trinitarian depths, not only sacramentally at the time of our
baptism, but at every moment as we live out our baptismal life? And when was
the last time we heard in our own dark depths the Spirit of adoption leading us
out of fear and making us cry out, “Abba!”?
Like the Samaritan woman
bantering with Jesus by Jacob’s well, getting closer and closer to discovering
who he is, we are told by an encouraging Christ: “If only you knew the Gift of
God!” This Gift is no abstraction. Neither is the dogma of the Holy Trinity an
abstraction, mere information regarding God’s inner life. It is rather a
stunning, blissful experience. The God who created us is the God who came to us
in Jesus Christ to take us back to his heart, and this same God is with us now
as the Spirit of the Risen Lord. It was the actual experience of this threefold
presence of God as Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier, which led the Church,
guided, as promised, by the Holy Spirit, to infer that in some mysterious way,
God is triune in nature. This is not something to be “worked out” by us
theologically, but known by us as we are caught up in the Trinitarian stream of
life. The only way we know that we share God’s life in a truly divine way,
however, is that we discover that God gives himself totally to us.
