On this great feast of the Holy Trinity, there is a story about St. Augustine that tells us something about this mystery of our faith. You may have heard it as well. As the story goes, St. Augustine was walking along the beach one day, trying to understand the mystery of the Holy Trinity—how God can be three persons in one. As he walked along, he saw a young boy fill a seashell with water from the ocean and pour it into a small hole in the sand. Out of curiosity, Augustine asked him what he was doing. The boy replied, “I’m trying to fit the entire ocean into this hole.” Augustine smiled and said, “That’s impossible. The ocean is too big for such a small hole.” The boy looked at him and said, “And so is the mystery of God too big for your mind to fully understand.” Then the boy vanished.
True or not, the story calls attention to the fact that, although much has been said and written about the Trinity, we know about the Trinity primarily through revelation and God’s grace. The Trinity is the foundation and central mystery of our Christian faith (CCC 232). We first encounter this mystery most explicitly perhaps at the baptism of Jesus where God the Father testifies: “This is my Son whom I love; with him I am well pleased” (Mt. 3:17). The Holy Spirit appears as a dove and descends on Jesus. This is enough to convince John the Baptist that Jesus is the Christ, the promised Messiah.
These are personal terms—Father, Son, and Spirit—that reveal a loving intimacy between the Persons of the Trinity. Jesus reaffirms this idea with his promise to send the Advocate as someone who will remind others and teach them. This description of the Holy Spirit is one of a real person (Jn 14:26). Teaching and reminding are what a real person does.
This description the Trinity as a unity of coequal persons working together for our salvation is consistent with our understanding of the term person. We understand person not as a “me” term, but essentially as a “we” term. An authentic person fully exists only in relationship to others.[1] An authentic person lives in an interpersonal, interconnected loving relationship of self-giving and receiving.
The Apostle John expresses this idea in describing God as love itself, poured into our hearts (1 Jn 4:8; 4-16; Rm 5:5). He means that the love in our hearts is in fact God himself. The Triune, loving God is in us and we are in the Triune, loving God (1 Jn 4:16). Our God-given nature, therefore, is to be a lover, to express the love in our hearts (1 Jn 5:3-5). This is the nature of love. Love always seeks to express itself to the one loved, and wants to be loved in return. Then, we feel grateful. Authentic love, in fact, is complete when it is actively given and actively received with gratitude.”[2]
This desire for reciprocal love makes us vulnerable, however, for the one we love may not love us in return.[3] When this happens, we often feel sad, disappointed and even frustrated. Can we say the same about the Trinity? Does God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit feel sad and disappointed when we do not love him or his children as he has loved us? The answer must be yes. Why else would Jesus urge us to love one another as he has loved us. To love others is to love God. Jesus makes this plain when he says that whatever we do for the least of his children, we do to and for God himself (Mt 25:40). This is how we return God’s love for us, by loving others.
Love for God and his children also includes love for his creation, the only home he created for his children on earth. God first reveals himself to us through his creation as noted in the Book of Genesis: “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth” (Gen 1:1; cf. CCC 47-50). The reading from Proverbs celebrates the wisdom of God as the architect of creation. This poem highlights the playful delight of God in carrying out his creativity, and his joy in being with humanity. Through his creation, God reveals his desire to be involved with us by sharing his own love and goodness with us in a way that gives us life to the full.[4]
Caring for creation is how we express our gratitude for this gift from God. Such gratitude inspired the late Pope Francis to issue his encyclical on the environment (Laudato Si). In that encyclical, Francis claims that we have a duty to care for creation, our only home this side of eternity. Like any home, we must provide adequate and proper care for where we live. We live together on this planet in a kind of interconnected communion that supports and protects life itself (93; cf. Franco).
The feast of the Holy Trinity is a reason to celebrate our commitment to caring for this communion with others and with God. Caring for each other and God’s creation is a way to imitate the loving relationship of the Trinity. Through his life and mission, Jesus revealed to us the person of God the Father as the eternal one who creates all things; the person of God the faithful Son as the one who brings eternal life; the person of God the loving Spirit as the ground of truth, who lives among us and empowers us to follow Jesus in bringing about the Kingdom of God.
Today on this great feast, we call upon this Triune God—Creator, Redeemer, and Spirit-Among-Us, a God who labors within us and brings us to birth. We call upon this Triune God beyond all names and beyond all human understanding in the language of our hearts, the image of our desire, to commemorate the providence of God in our lives, and to give thanks for his benevolence.
We love God more than we know or can say about God. We pray that our love will be like God’s love—creating, redeeming, renewing. From beginning to end, we call on God in the universal language of our faith to renew us in his Spirit—in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
[1] Challenges and Renewals, W. Norris Clarke, University of Notre Dame Press, 1966, 74-75.
[2] Person, Being, and St. Thomas, W.Norris Clarke, Communio 19: International Catholic Review (Winter 1992).
[3] Authentic Living: How to Be Real, Jeremy Sutton, Ph.D., Positive Psychology (March 2021).
[4] Jacques Maritain, Existence and the Existent. Garden City: Doubleday, 1957, 90.
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