Triune God

Homelessness . . . . There is a great deal of it in today’s world. We have only to think of the horrific “homelessness” experienced in the trenches and uninhabitable rubble in Ukraine. Or in our own country, think of the traumatic “homelessness” in detention centers for illegal migrants along our southwest border, especially for children separated from their parents and the old who have been uprooted by desperation with now no relative or neighbor to help them. Or closer to home, what about the increasingly prevalent homelessness on our streets, or the forced homelessness for nearly 2 million incarcerated men and women in prisons across our country? “Homelessness” is also a devastating reality for those forgotten in nursing homes, for the casualties of broken homes, and really for anyone suffering alienation, rejection, or isolation. If we stop to think about it, we are virtually “homeless” whenever we are lost in self-preoccupation, self-centeredness, or are stuck on ourselves—that is an existence worse than lonely, and has become a kind of “pandemic” of its own. A society as violent as ours betrays a spiritual homelessness—as of late May there have been more than 260 mass shootings in the US this year, and yet these account for a relatively small percentage of gun deaths in 2023 thus far. Homelessness in so many ways . . . .

The German theologian and philosopher Romano Guardini, writing during the aftermath of WWII, made the following observation that is just as apt in our own day as was in his: “The convulsions of the times make clear something that has always existed but which is sometimes hidden by outward well-being and a prevailing peace of mind: namely, the homelessness of our lives.” The homelessness of our lives . . . .

This, I believe, is a realistic horizon against which to appreciate today’s Feast of the Most Holy Trinity, when in the light of Eastertide and Pentecost we contemplate and worship the divine life of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit: a life of communion and of perfect love, the origin and aim of all the universe and of every creature.

Today we do not praise God for a specific mystery, but for himself. We praise him and thank him because he is Love, and because he calls us to enter into the embrace of his inner communion which is eternal life. Certainly we do not celebrate a theological concept, the “absolute Triune God in splendid isolation,” but God as revealed by Jesus Christ. And what Jesus reveals, especially during his farewell discourse to his disciples the night before he died, and in his prayer to the Father deliberately in the disciples’ hearing on that occasion, is that the Father, and he the Son, actually make their home in us, abide in us. It was for this we were created. We traditionally refer to this greatest grace of our lives as the “indwelling” of the Trinity through the Holy Spirit, the Love of God, who has been poured into our hearts. In other words, Jesus is reassuring his disciples, and us, that God’s love and his saving presence is in each one of us, and in all of us together, in everything that happens in our lives: “indwelling”—dwelling, abiding, in our innermost depths, “closer to us than we are to ourselves,” and calling us to find eternal life, the “home” of our lives, by participating in the divine inner life.

God is Love, and love did not allow God to remain alone! That is a staggering thought. Jesus reveals that the great design of God’s love is this: that the three Divine Persons make their home in us, and draw us by grace into their innermost life and communion to find our home in them. Let us listen again to how Jesus articulates this core Trinitarian mystery of the Divine Indwelling in the Fourth Gospel:

In Ch. 14 Jesus tells Thomas: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will also know my Father. From now on you do know him and have seen him…. Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”

And that is not all. Jesus assures his disciples, and us: “As the Father loves me, so I also love you …. Whoever loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and reveal myself to him. We will come to him and make our dwelling with him…. The Father himself loves you, because you have loved me and have come to believe that I came from God.” 

Jesus then prays in the presence of his disciples that the Father will give eternal life to all those whom the Father gave him and who now believe that he was sent by the Father. He addresses the Father: “I pray for the ones you have given me, because they are yours, and everything of mine is yours, and everything of yours is mine, and I have been glorified in them…. I pray not only for them, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, so that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us….” (That is what I mean by finding our true “home” in God.) Jesus continues: “And I have given them the glory you gave me, so that they may all be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may be brought to perfection as one…. Father, I made known to them your name and I will make it known, that the love with which you loved me may be in them and I in them.”  (John 17) 

That Love is the Holy Spirit, whom we celebrated last Sunday, on Pentecost. Jesus assures his disciples, and us: “Another Advocate to be with you always, the Spirit of truth, which you know because it remains with you, and will be in you….On that day you will realize that I am in my Father and you are in me and I in you.”

To sum up and conclude, the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity points to the great mystery of the indwelling of the Divine Persons in us: the Triune God who is Love, making his “home” in us so that we can find our “home” in him.  I am suggesting this morning that in his “last discourse” in the Fourth Gospel, Jesus addresses head-on the radical “homelessness” of our lives, and calls us to enter into the embrace of this innermost Trinitarian communion which is eternal life. The Good News is that God himself is an eternal exchange of love—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—and that he has created and redeemed us so that we can share in that exchange. Jesus, who as the “human face of God” has revealed all this to us, asks only that we believe in him as sent by the Father, and love one another as he has loved us.

But that is a tall order! It all hinges on our loving one another as Christ has loved us. Are we capable of such selfless love, divine love? I’d like to leave you with Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini’s perspective on this sobering question. I find in these words of his a great encouragement:

 We do not ever know whether or not our love of God is truly selfless, but we do know that by his own mysterious paths God will bring our love to the point of complete purification. Indeed, each of us can say: “The problem of pure, selfless love is not my problem; it is the problem of the God who has confidence in me and knows me to be capable of a love equal to his own, for I am made in his own image and he dwells within me. It is for me to give God my whole self, and for him to draw me to himself in the way he regards as truest and most authentic. For the rest—and the Song of Songs gives us this insight—true love is its own fulfillment, its own beauty, its own reward. It is when we grasp this that we enter into the love of God, that love which has its justification only in itself. Lovers know perfectly well that love is freely given, even if it then feeds on countless satisfactions. But in its innermost essence it is an unrivaled gift of self, and thus a reflection of the life of the Trinity. 

Photograph by Brother Brian. Trinity Sunday homily by Father Dominic.