Celebrating the mystery of the Trinity this Sunday should not just lead us to wonder at the mystery of God — it should lead us to accept the mystery of one another.
BY Father Owen Kearns
Publisher
June 3-9, 2007 Issue |
Posted 5/29/07 at 7:00 AM
Celebrating
the mystery of the Trinity this Sunday should not just lead us to wonder at the
mystery of God — it should lead us to accept the mystery of one another.
When we make the Sign of the Cross,
we don’t say in the names of the Father, Son and
Holy Spirit.
We say: “In the name of the Father, and of
the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”
The very language proclaims that God
is one, but that he is not a divine ego, a lone God. He is a communion of life
and love: Everything the Father is, the Son is — except he isn’t the Father. He
is light from light, true God from true God. With the Father and the Son, the
Holy Spirit shares in the same life, totally and fully.
We who are made in the image and
likeness of the Triune God have to mirror that communion among ourselves.
Our neighbor is a mystery to us. We
can’t know his thoughts. We can’t know the status of his relationship with God.
We can’t know his motives, intentions, or struggles.
All we know is that God wants us to
be one with our neighbor — especially in the Church.
We have to be one with our bishop,
one with our pope. We have to be one the way a family is one. To mirror the
Trinity, it is necessary to build communio not just with the
hierarchy as an ideal — but with the actual bishops we happen to have, with the
pope that we happen to have, warts and all.
Being picky and finding fault is a
manifestation of a weak faith. God established this Church and made this bishop
and this Pope our pastors just as surely as he established our family and made
this man and this woman to be our father and mother.
There’s no changing it or trying to
deny it.
This Trinity Sunday, look around the
Church during the recitation of the creed. What you see is, as St. Cyprian
liked to say, “a people gathered together by the unity of the Father, the Son
and the Holy Spirit.”
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