May 30, 1999 |
This being Trinity Sunday, I would like to share with you some of the official teaching of the Church on this most central mystery of our Faith. It is from the CATECHISM OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH:
The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is the central mystery of Christian faith and life. It is the mystery of God in himself. It is therefore the source of all the other mysteries of faith, the light that enlightens them. It is the most fundamental and essential teaching in the 'hierarchy of the truths of faith.' The whole history of salvation is identical with the history of the way and the means by which the one true God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, reveals himself to men and reconciles and unites with himself those who turn away from sin. From the beginning, the revealed truth of the Holy Trinity has been at the very root of the Church's living faith, principally by means of Baptism. It finds its expression in the rule of baptismal faith, formulated in the preaching, catechesis, and prayer of the Church. Such formulations are already found in the apostolic writings, such as this salutation taken up in the Eucharistic liturgy:
'The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.' (nos. 234 and 239).
A special feast devoted to the Holy Trinity began in the kingdom of Charlemagne before the year 1000. It was celebrated on the first Sunday after Pentecost. Pope John XXII made it universal in 1334. Throughout the years several popular symbols have been used to represent the Trinity. Since the 6th century, an older man, a younger man, and a dove have symbolized the Trinity. This is the symbol that appeared in the Baltimore Catechism. The triangle surrounded by rays of light with an eye in the middle is another symbolic representation. A version of this symbol is on our one-dollar bill. St Patrick used the shamrock to help teach about the unity of our Triune God.
St. Justin died around 165 A.D. His body is in the Capuchin Church of the Immaculate Conception on the Via Veneto in Rome. Justin was perhaps the most intellectual layman of the second century. His writings about the Christian faith and practices make fine reading, even today. We have from Justin a remarkably detailed account of the Eucharist (Mass) as it was celebrated on the Lord's Day (Sunday) in the very first century after Christ and the apostles.
Memorial Day, holiday or holy day? I began asking this question after visiting the American Cemetery in Luxembourg. This is the cemetery where World War II dead from the Battle of the Bulge are buried. I had traveled with a group of American military personnel from Mons, Belgium, where the supreme headquarters of the allied powers in Europe (SHAPE) is located. It was a very sobering day. The Battle of the Bulge has inspired many war movies, but its reality is deeply carved in the hearts and memories of the people who still live in the area. Even generations that couldn't have known the battle have a sense of its significance. As we arrived at the cemetery it started to rain and quickly turned into a good healthy European rain. Some people decided to stay on the bus. I chose to go into the cemetery. The sky was dark and bleak. As I entered the cemetery my attention was seized by a sea of White Crosses and Stars of David in neat, symmetrical rows as far as the eye could see. I stopped, awestruck! The first thought that crossed my mind; "The price of war!" I walked through the rows of graves with names and states of origin on them. The ranks indicated mostly young and inexperienced soldiers. Turning to go back to the bus, I spotted a grave set apart. There was a huge spray of fresh flowers. The marker identified it as the grave of General Patton. I stood there and said a prayer. As I looked around one more time, I noticed how many graves had fresh flowers. The people of Luxembourg and Belgium could not forget their liberators. It was forty years after the war ended and still people cared. It was impressive. I've seen this repeated in American Cemeteries in England, Holland and France. I saw it at the Punch Bowl in Honolulu. I saw the flowers again at the dark, awesome memorial to the Viet Nam veterans in Washington. I remember a lady gently dropping flowers on the water over the Arizona at Pearl Harbor. I noted how hushed tourists became as they visited these sites. I know in communities around the world, flowers will be placed on graves, tears will be shed, and memories relived, sometimes painfully, this weekend. It really isn't necessary to look back for memorials. The tragedies of life keep creating new needs for Memorial Day. I intend to keep this holiday holy by praying for those memorialized. Pray with me, please, especially, for the gruesome loss of life in Kosovo.
Father Michael Doyle, OSM
We hear today on the Gospel, "God so loved the world," (Jn 3.16) and in this we also discover the central mystery of our faith at the foundation of all that we hold is the revelation that God is a trinity of persons in one God.
This we can't discover on our own; it has been revealed to us by the Son, Jesus Christ. Let me just consider one aspect. We can never know God within Himself; however we have been the privilege of knowing God in the many ways that He has disclosed Himself: creator, savior, protector and ultimate goal. God invites us into eternal life.
God is a relationship of persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. As we find in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, #254 , "He is not the Father who is the Son, nor is the Holy Spirit he who is the Father or the Son." They are distinct from one another on their relations of origin: "It is the Father who generates, the Son who is begotten and the Holy Spirit who proceeds."
The divine Unity is Triune.
The mystery we celebrate in the liturgy today is summarized in the greeting at the beginning of Mass. "The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all" (Cor. 13.13).
May the Triune God deepen your awareness and give glory to the Holy one.
Fr. Ron
Long before Jesus inaugurated what would become Christian history, God had assembled a community of persons bound by a sacred covenant. God demonstrated and demanded justice - SOCIAL JUSTICE. Christians need to remember that the God of Israel was the God of Jesus and is the God of Christians. The founding principles, if not the specific practices, of God's covenant with Israel carry a great deal of weight in the new testament.
The book of Deuteronomy contains a collection of laws updating the covenant of Sinai some six centuries later. The book comes down strongly on the side of the disadvantaged classes, e.g., widows, fatherless, and aliens. The purpose of the law is to outline a level of moral performance compatible with the self-revelation of Israel's God and Israel's high calling.
Deuteronomy's clear and steady insistence on the individual's responsibility within and to the community is profoundly impressive. It's message is clear, crisp, concise and uncompromising. God's community must be a just society.
GOD DID NOT MAKE A COVENANT WITH AN INDIVIDUAL, BUT WITH A COMMUNITY. God saves people within the community, not apart from it. This fundamental fact drops a heavy hammer on much of contemporary individualistic spirituality, e.g., it's between me and my God! We live in a society that prides itself on individual freedom; on rights to privacy that among other things effectively cut parents out of the loop of their teenage children; making life and death decisions; on free enterprise translated into almost incalculable differences between the affluent and the poor. God says that every individual is accountable to and for the community.
We all need to raise our consciousness relating to coherence between one's professed belief and practical behavior.
FOR ONE WHO BELIEVES IN GOD, IT IS IMPERATIVE TO PONDER THE VIEWPOINT OF GOD, AND IT IS SOON OBVIOUS THAT FROM GOD'S POINT OF VIEW, INDIVIDUALISM IS NOT A SIGN OF HEALTHY SPIRITUALITY.
For more than three millennia God has been outspoken about the need for every person to be seriously and generously concerned about the well-being of others. God's most emphatic Word, of course, is Jesus Christ. Listen to what he tells us!
A new commandment I give you, that you love each other as I have loved you.
The genuinely great person is the one who serves others.
Live in me as I live in you.
Learn from me for I am gentle and humble of heart.
The liturgy of the church attempts to draw us more and more intimately into the paschal mystery: the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
DYING TO SELF-CENTERED INDIVIDUALISM, THE BAPTIZED BELIEVER RISES TO NEW HEIGHTS OF SOCIAL CONCERN, OF SOCIAL JUSTICE AND, CONSEQUENTLY, OF HEALTHY SPIRITUALITY.
When we consider the mystery of the Blessed Trinity as revealed by God, we stand in amazement that he would relinquish himself so completely to his creatures; that he would surrender his most precious secret. But he did it with a love which the Incarnate Word called "friendship" and theology terms "love of benevolence." "I have told you all things that I heard from the Father." St. Thomas wrote: "For, since charity unites affections and makes, as it were, one heart of two, one seems not to have dismissed from his heart that which he reveals to a friend; and so our Lord says to his disciples; 'I will not now call you servants.'"
God placed us in the very heart of the Trinity when he proclaimed this mystery. He communicated it to his creatures because "He wanted to draw us into the depths of his heart." He drew us into this sharing in the divine nature because we alone would not have been able to understand or bear this most central mystery.
The mystery of the Trinity is the prototype and foundation of our sanctification. Until we lay our foundation on this trinitarian structure, we cannot understand our state of grace nor the whole divine economy of salvation.
The simplest trinitarian formulation of the Credo is preserved in the baptismal formula of an ancient Egyptian papyrus:
I believe in God the Father, the Almighty,
and in his only-begotten Son,
our Lord Jesus Christ,
and in the Holy Spirit
and in the resurrection of the body
in the Holy, Catholic Church.
This Creed doesn't begin with a confession of belief in One God (that was presupposed). It begins with the confession of this one God, who is the Father of the only- begotten Son. And this son is "our Kyrios," who had an earthly name, Jesus. He was the Christ anointed by the Spirit--by that same Spirit who is the God of my faith. In Christ, Father and Spirit have come to us.
--Fr. Hugo Rahner
(Excerpts from Donald Tauscher, OSB Quarterly Magazine, St.John's Abbey)
THEME: MYSTERY: We can always draw from the well of mystery. It is an inexhaustible well. There is always something to be discovered. People are mysteries to us, even the people we live nearest to and love most and think we know. The fundamental mystery of persons makes life interesting of course. It also keeps the rumor and gossip mills going. The mystery of the individual and the depth of his or her soul offers us but a faint shadow of the mystery of God, who is three Persons -- Father, Son, and Spirit. This is a mystery we will never cease contemplating and celebrating.
Celebrate 2000...Reflections on Jesus, The Holy Spirit, and the Father, by Pope John Paul II. An Indissoluble Communion It is a fundamental duty of the Church to reaffirm strongly...the doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage. To all those who in our times consider it too difficult or indeed impossible to be bound to one person for the whole of life, and to those caught up in a culture that rejects the indissolubility of marriage and openly mocks the commitment of spouses to fidelity, it is necessary to reconfirm the good news of the definitive nature of that conjugal love that has in Christ its foundation and strength.
Being rooted in the personal and total self-giving of the couple and being required by the good of the children, the indissolubility of marriage finds its ultimate truth in the plan that God has manifested in His Revelation: He wills and He communicates the indissolubility of marriage as a fruit, a sign, and a requirement of the absolutely faithful love that God has for man and that the Lord Jesus has for the Church...
The gift of the Sacrament [of Matrimony] is at the same time a vocation and commandment for the Christian spouses, that they may remain faithful to each other forever, beyond every trial and difficulty, in generous obedience to the holy will of the Lord: What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder (Mt. 19:6)
To bear witness to the inestimable value of the indissolubility and fidelity of marriage is one of the most precious and most urgent tasks of Christian couples in our time...I praise and encourage those numerous couples who, though encountering no small difficulty, preserve and develop the value of indissolubility. Thus in a humble and courageous manner they perform the role committed to them of being a sign - a small and precious sign, sometimes also subjected to temptation, but always renewed - of the unfailing fidelity with which God and Jesus Christ love each and every human being.
But it is also proper to recognize the value of the witness of those spouses who, even when abandoned by their partner, with the strength of faith and of Christian hope have not entered a new union: These spouses too give an authentic witness to fidelity, of which the world today has a great need. For this reason they must be encouraged and helped by the pastors and the faithful of the Church. [FC n. 20]
A southern minister was completing a temperance sermon. With great expression he said, "If I had all the beer in the world, I'd take it and pour it into the river." With even greater emphasis he said, "And if I had all the wine in the world, I'd take it and pour it into the river." And then finally, he said, "And if I had all the whiskey in the world, I'd take it and pour it into the river." With the sermon complete, he then sat down. The song leader stood very cautiously and announced with a smile, "For our closing song, let us sing Hymn #365, 'Shall We Gather at the River.'
