In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask you for pardon of my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Mother Immaculate, St. Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.
The very first point in the Catechism of the Catholic Church is like a summary, somehow, of the whole work of salvation. This great- perhaps the greatest ever, and richest explanation of the faith of the Church, the Catechism, which is a fruit of the Second Vatican Council, the Catechism which was promulgated by St. John Paul II thirty years ago this year, it's a very rich document, but it begins with this point, point number one: "God, infinitely perfect and blessed in himself, in a plan of sheer goodness, freely created man to make him share in his own blessed life. For this reason, at every time and in every place, God draws close to man. He calls man to seek him, to know him, to love him with all his strength. He calls together all men scattered and divided by sin into the unity of his family, the Church.”
The Solemnity of the Most Blessed Trinity is about this perfection of God in his own blessed life and, at the same time, about God's loving invitation to all people to enter into a share in that life. This is all explained only by the dynamic of love. God, who is all perfect, who is all blessed, who is completely self-sufficient, has no need of us, but because he is love, his- he reaches out to us and draws us into his divine life, into the life of the Blessed Trinity. So, when we pray about this mystery of the Blessed Trinity, on the one hand it can seem a bit daunting. We feel the Blessed Trinity- it’s so beyond what we can understand. It's inaccessible to me, we might feel. But in reality, the Blessed Trinity is home for us. It's from the Trinity we come, and it’s to the Trinity we are called, all of this through Jesus Christ Our Lord. Trinity is home for us.
In fact, we can't even understand ourselves as human beings, in our personhood and in our capacity, our need to relate with other persons– we can't understand any of that unless we understand the Trinity. After all, we're made in the image and likeness of God, and God is Trinity. He's a communion of persons. He is, we can say, the original family. So, to understand the human person, to understand the human family, to understand our sociability, which is essential to our nature, we- we do need to look at God in whose image we are made. God, who is love, that's why the human beings fundamental and innate vocation is to love, because we're made in the image of God who is love, who is Trinity, who is love.
So, on the one hand, the mystery of the Blessed Trinity is indeed sublime and beyond our full understanding, that's very sure. Lord, if I could understand you, you wouldn't be much of a God. If you could fit into my little head, what kind of a God would you be? And yet, we have a certain grasp, a certain understanding of- of the Lord, of the Blessed Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, even by looking at ourselves because, if you and I are made in the image of God, surely within us then there is the image of the Trinity. And an aspect of the image of the Trinity in us is the capacity, the need, the vocation to love, to mutual self-giving. After all, God does not live in splendid isolation, he is eternal communion, eternal dialogue between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He is love because he is mutual self-giving.
The story is sometimes told of the non-believer who challenges the believer- the non-believer who challenges the Christian and says, "If there are three persons in God, how can God be one?" To which the Christian replies, "If God is on his own, how can he be love?" And indeed, that's- that's a deep perception of the Trinity, that God is love and therefore, he involves otherness, self-giving to the other, and there is this otherness in God. It’s the relationship between the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit which is- which is profoundly loving, it's the model of all true love, it's the model of every human relationship, especially of the family. It's the model of marriage. It's the model of every form of human self-giving of disinterested love. We find all that in the Trinity. So, on the one hand, yes, the mystery of the Blessed Trinity is well beyond us. On the other hand, we are utterly at home in this mystery because only in the mystery of you, Lord, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, do we actually discover our identity and do we find, if you like the rationale, the root of our vocation to self-giving and to love, to give love and receive love.
St. Josemaria, as we know, had a deep awareness of God who comes out to meet us. He doesn't dwell in splendid isolation and self-sufficient perfection. He doesn't look on clinically from afar at his creatures. No, God Our Lord seeks us out. God looks for us as- as Jesus tells us, in that image, that beautiful image in the gospels of the shepherd who goes out looking for the last sheep, that- that's how God looks for us. Or, we think of that other beautiful parable of the Good Samaritan. Well, humanity, you and I, men and women, all of us, we are the man- the Samaritan, excuse me, not the Samaritan, but the man who has been attacked, we're the man who's lying at the side of the road who has been bludgeoned and brutalized and left half-dead. That's us, because we need salvation, we’re not perfect. We all have our battles. We all have our sins and limitations. And God is the Good Samaritan who seeks us out, who doesn't stay at home in his own perfection, but rather comes looking for us.
St. Josemaria had a deep awareness of this reality of God which ultimately explains the existence of the Church. In fact, in his homily The Great Unknown, which is a beautiful homily on the Holy Spirit, and you could say it's also a beautiful homily on the Church, St. Josemaria gives this description of the Church. He says, “What is most important in the Church is not how we humans react, but how God acts." And then he says, "This is what the Church is: Christ present in our midst, God coming toward men in order to save them, calling us by his revelation, sanctifying us with his grace, maintaining us with his constant help in the great and small battles of our daily life.”
So, this is the Church. God who seeks us, God who takes the initiative, God who comes out to us, and that's the Trinity. God reveals himself to us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and he draws us into communion with him, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And, of course, we wouldn't know that God is Trinity if he hadn't revealed himself to be such. So today, on the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity, we are plunged into the mystery of God's identity as love and, at the same time, we're also plunged into our own mystery as beings, creatures, who are called to love in and through God who is love.
C.S. Lewis says somewhere in his writings that, next to the Blessed Sacrament, what we should most reverence in this world is another human being, which is a lovely thing to pray about. That yeah, absolutely, what deserves our greatest love and reverence is the Blessed Sacrament, Jesus among us. But next to that, what we most reverence is another human person. And that is something as- as Christians, as Catholics, we have a deep awareness of the dignity of each and every person. Every single person, actually, every person is a gift to us. Any person we meet– a poor person, or rich person, a relation, a stranger– every person we meet in our lives is a gift, every conversation actually is a gift. Every person, you could say, is a mine of God's treasures. People make life worth living, you could say. And if this is the case with human persons, what about the Divine Persons? Today in our prayer we can think about this, and not only think about but pray to each one of the Divine Persons because we're actually made for relationship with the Father, with the Son, and with the Holy Spirit. It's not something artificial, it's something that we're called to.
In his homily called Towards Holiness, which traces, you might say, the trajectory of the prayer life of the Christian, St. Josemaria says, "Our heart needs to distinguish and adore each one of the Divine Persons. The soul is, as it were, making a discovery in the supernatural life, like a little child opening his eyes to the world around him. The soul spends time lovingly with the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and readily submits to the work of the life giving Paraclete.” To spend time lovingly, with the Father, with the Son, and with the Holy Spirit, that’s what we're called- that's what we can do right now in our prayer, to be with each one of the persons of the Blessed Trinity, to have a personal relationship with each one, to realize that each one of the Divine Persons is a huge gift to each one of us. And that- that our relationship with each one is- is personal and unique. You know, the way sometimes we meet a person who- who just gives us a lift or a boost, or are we detecting them a depth of being or a human richness and we say, well, that person- actually, that person, he made my day, or she made my day; he really made my day.
It's interesting, a barber, who used to cut St. Josemaria's hair, he was obviously very taken by the person of St. Josemaria, and on one occasion he said, you know, after cutting his hair, he said to somebody else, didn't say it to St. Josemaria himself, but he said it to somebody else and said, with that man, I would go to the ends of the Earth, I'd go to the ends of the Earth with that man, you know. So, he discovered in the person of the founder of the Work a richness, a beauty, a friendship, you know, in his person. And great and all as the person of a saint like St. Josemaria is, how much greater is the person of God the Father, the person of God the Son, the person of God the Holy Spirit. So today, on the Feast of the Blessed Trinity, we could ask for the grace to have a relationship with each one of the Divine Persons and to spend some time conversing with them in our moments of mental prayer, or when we walk on the street, or when we're sitting in the garden, or wherever it might be, whatever it might be, to connect with each one of them because we are made for that love, we are capacitated for that dialogue.
God, infinitely perfect and blessed in himself freely created man to make him share in his own blessed life. We're going back there again to the very first point of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the Blessed Trinity, God's infinite, perfect life is not just a mystery to be contemplated, you know, which is a great thing to do, to contemplate the Trinity as so many saints and mystics have done and- and still do, but it's not even just something to pray about or to meditate on, or to look at with the eyes of our soul. They're all very good things to do, but there's more. We're not just called and capacitated to speak with each one of the Divine Persons, wonderful as that is. We are called to share in their life. Somehow our life is integrated into the life of the Trinity, into the life of God. This happens through grace, through baptism, and through grace throughout our lives.
In one of his homilies, in Christ is Passing By, St. Josemaria says, "We do not exist in order to pursue just any happiness. We have been called to penetrate the intimacy of God's own life, to know and love God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit and to love also in that same love of the one God in three Divine Persons, the angels, and all people." So, we've been called to penetrate the intimacy of God's own life, to know and love God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, and also all people, and also the angels and the saints. It's not just looking on at God from the outside, but we're in- we enter into the intimacy of God. And your life, my life, our daily work, our ordinary bits and pieces, our family life, our relationships, our ups and our downs are moments of health or moments of ill-health, everything somehow shares in the gracious life of the Trinity.
St. Paul says that to the Colossians in that letter when he's meditating on the Resurrection of Jesus. He, as it were, draws out one of the effects of Our Lord's Resurrection for the faithful, and that's where he says, your life is hidden with Christ in God so that all of our lives, from the most ordinary, seemingly mundane activities- fixing the car, taking a bus, listening to music, going for a jog, working in the garden, sleeping, waking, cooking, eating, loving, suffering– whatever aspect of our lives we live through, and probably we do a bit of all those things every day, all of that somehow is within the divine dialogue of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit because the Lord has invited us into his intimacy, into his own blessed life, as the Catechism says.
And here, I suppose, also we have the theological basis for what St. Josemaria preached about the sanctification of the ordinary. In what sense can we say that the ordinary is holy or that the ordinary is of an eternal value? Well, it's holy and of an eternal value because it is somehow a sharing in the life of God through grace, through- through Christ, ultimately. And that's the last but certainly not the least consideration of this moment of prayer. Our entrance point into the Trinity- into the life of the Trinity is through Jesus Christ Our Lord. That's why so many of our prayers, especially our liturgical prayers, the prayer of the holy people of God of the Mystical Body, ends with that very crucial point through Jesus Christ Our Lord. You, Lord Jesus, you are the gate into the sheepfold, you are the entrance door into the life of the Trinity. And you'll say to us, as you said to Philip at the Last Supper, you said to him, "He who sees me sees the Father." So, looking on Christ, contemplating the sacred humanity of Our Lord, that's how we enter into the intimacy of the Trinity, that's how we reach the Father, by the work of the Holy Spirit. That's why St. Josemaria often used to repeat in writing, and also verbally, say, "May you seek Christ, may you find Christ, may you speak with Christ; may you love Christ and then bring him everywhere." So, to be Christ-centered is to push open the door into the Trinity because it's through Jesus Christ, it's through the Son that you and I as children of God share in the blessed life of God, Father, Son and the Holy Spirit. We ask Our Lady to intercede for us. We ask St. Josemaria also to pray for us that we may savor the mystery of our life in God one and three.
I give you thanks, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations you have communicated to me in this time of prayer. I ask you for help to put them into effect. My Mother Immaculate, St. Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.