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Posts Tagged ‘Trinity’

Celebrate Today that God Can’t Be Put in a Box — or a Triangle

Posted in Holy Trinity, Reflections from Other Writers and Speakers, Reflections on Scripture, Who Am I in God, Who is God, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on May 24, 2024| Leave a Comment »

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Readings for May 26, 2024:

  1. Deuteronomy 4:32–34, 39–40
  2. Psalm 33:4–5, 6, 9, 18–19, 20, 22
  3. Romans 8:14–17
  4. Matthew 28:16–20

What this week’s readings say to me:

This week’s readings tell me that the Trinitarian nature of God means that God is more intimate with everything that is than human understanding can conceive of. And even though this is the case, God’s intimacy doesn’t mean that God is too small or too close to us to have a view with more dimensions than we can imagine. God so intimate as to dwell within us and to be discoverable in everything around us while being the source of all that is. God is the ultimate mother, father, sibling, partner, and inspiration.

What concerns us can neither be too big nor too small for God, and with God’s help, what concerns God is neither too unmanageable nor too insignificant for us to be concerned with. God invites us to open ourselves fully to the Trinity and the gifts — relationships, talents, and resources — that come from a God who is both so like and unlike us, a God who is without limits, except to the extent that God limits God’s self.

The following quotations from the readings for May 26 encapsulate for me what The Most Holy Trinity means:

. . . fix in your heart, that the LORD is God in the heavens above and on earth below. . . [Italics mine]

Deuteronomy 4:39

The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if only we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.

Romans 8:16-17

Does the second quotation mean that we should seek out suffering? No, but it acknowledges that to live as Jesus did during his time on earth, will have to allow ourselves to be inconvenienced at the very least. And we may be asked to endure more than inconvenience. If we never find ourselves inconvenienced by our efforts to follow and imitate Christ, how closely are we following and imitating him? Where are we on the path to becoming the people God can see is becoming if we follow and imitate Christ? Where are we on the journey to becoming undistorted versions of ourselves?

Then Jesus approached and said to them, “All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age.”

Matthew 28:16-20

What someone else is sharing about this week’s readings:

Julia Erdlen reflects on the mystery of the Trinity as both comforting and confounding.

Beyond this week’s readings:

When I grappled with what words of my own to use to summarize Julia Erdlen’s reflection, I used “confounding” because it started with the same letter as comforting, which would make the summary memorable and because I thought “confounding” meant “mysterious.”

However, the Oxford Languages dictionary that the Bing search engine defines confounding this way: “cause[ing] surprise or confusion in (someone), especially by acting against their expectations” Considering this definition, “confounding” and is an unintentionally fitting adjectives to use when describing a God who is three persons in one, a God who had us and all that’s good in mind before everything began, who has been with all that’s good in every way since it came into existence, and wants to bring us to be with Him if we’re willing to come and to let go of the work of our hands and let God free us from the clutches of what stands between us and Him. It takes a God who is both indwelling and who was before everything and will be after everything to accomplish all that. It takes a God that we can’t fully understand or describe an entirely accurate way. It takes a God who surprises us by “acting against our expectations” and working beyond our limitations. This Trinitarian God helps us recognize which limitations are real but only temporary and which are illusions God is waiting to help us see through once we ask for and we cooperate with the grace of the Holy Spirit.

This week’s prayer:

Lord, thank You for giving us today is a reminder of how surprising, how incomprehensible, and yet how familiar You are. Help us always to grow in familiarity with You until, when we pass from this life, we can fully embrace and understand You and all You have brought into being. We offer this prayer in the name of God who is one in three Persons — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

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A Lesson in What to Praise and Prioritize

Posted in Ordinary Time, Reflections from Other Writers and Speakers, Reflections on Scripture, Who Am I in God, Who is God, tagged , , , , on October 22, 2023| Leave a Comment »

Photo by Priyansh Patidar on Unsplash

This week’s readings:

  1. Isaiah 45:1, 4–6 
  2. Psalm 96:1, 3, 4–5, 7–8, 9–10
  3. 1 Thessalonians 1:1–5b
  4. Matthew 22:15–21

What this week’s readings say to me:

This week’s readings praise and honor God and advocate for my never ceasing to do the same. They also remind me that everyone and everything exists because of God’s power and with God’s consent. Without this power and consent, nothing would exist and nothing would be held together. But there is life, and there is relationship because God is life and relationship. There is life through relationship to God and one another.

The third reading continues to praise God while also highlighting the relationality of life in God. It also highlights how virtues are related to one another, saying:

We [Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy] give thanks to God always for all of you, remembering you in our prayers, unceasingly calling to mind your work of faith and labor of love and endurance in hope of our Lord Jesus Christ, before our God and Father, knowing, brothers and sisters loved by God, how you were chosen.

1 Thessalonians 2-4 [italics mine]

While nothing exists without God allowing it to, God wants us to love freely, and anything not done freely isn’t done in the love, so God doesn’t force us to bend to the Divine will. God gives us the freedom to be co-creators. The result of this freedom is that God isn’t the creator of everything. Some things are created by the tempter and accuser. Others are created by humans. We can use the things humans have created for good or ill.

Upon this reading of the Gospel passage, I feel like Jesus is asking me to think about what I value and to ask God to help me value my life-giving relationships more than the things I can use to benefit those relationships. It also challenges me to discern how the things I use affect my relationships with God and others. To what extent are these effects positive and negative?

What someone else is sharing about this week’s readings:

Chanelle Robinson’s reflection offers one possible response to the question with which I ended the previous section.

Beyond this week’s readings:

Lord, grant me the grace to recognize what belongs to you and to employ it to bring myself and others into union with you. Give me a deep awareness that this union is the source of all beauty, growth, and peace. Help me to remember to thank you for inviting everyone to share these gifts. Thank you, Lord. Amen.

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The Trinity Embraces Intimacy and Transcendence

Posted in Reflections on a Verse, Reflections on Scripture, Who Am I in God, Who is God, tagged , , , , on June 4, 2023| Leave a Comment »

Photo by Janine Meuche on Unsplash

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.

2 Corinthians 13:13

Today, we arrive again at Trinity Sunday. Here’s what I posted in honor of Trinity Sunday last year. I wanted to link to it because Richard Rohr’s reflection on the Trinity, which I included in the post, is insightful and helpful. But my plan from here on out is not simply to repost or to link to other posts.

This year, I feel prompted to sit with the Trinity by reflecting on 2 Corinthians 13:13. As I revisit this verse, it’s tempting to put dividers that are too solid between the Persons of the Trinity, to get the impression that the Lord Jesus Christ offers grace, God offers love, and the Holy Spirit offers fellowship, as if each of the Persons has a separate role. Yet I trust that my Creator, my Redeemer, and my sanctifier, a.k.a. my Father, my Brother, and the “love between them” extend grace, sacrificial love, and fellowship (Rohr). This one God in three Persons always has. The redemption began as soon as sin did. I trust that no part of God’s nature has ever not existed, and that the very nature of the Divine Being is grace, love, and fellowship. The theology of the Trinity reminds me that God is so intimate with me as to abide in my soul and body. At the same time, it reminds me that God’s nature and ways are above mine because God is the source and sustainer of all that lives and/or provides, all that is good. God is the ultimate intimacy and the ultimate transcendence. I’d say the way these qualities are entwined with each other like the strands of a braid is expressed as the Trinity.

What can this entwinning of seemingly opposite qualities, this Trinity, mean for my life and yours? As I’ve been mulling over this post the last couple of weeks, John 17 has been among the Gospel readings for each day. In this chapter, Jesus prays and teaches us what the Trinity can do and mean in our lives because of what it does and means in His. It means there’s no distance between Him and His father. is in His father and His father is in him. ( John 14:11). This abiding allows him to draw as near to other people as they will allow. If they don’t put up walls between themselves and him, and thus between themselves and the Father, they will be one with each other and will do God’s work. Their reflection of God and doing of God’s work will glorify the Father, and through the reflection and work the Father will glorify them.

Such glorification will result in those who allow the oneness standing out from whatever isn’t compatible with the life-giving, growth-supporting nature of the oneness. Whatever and whoever embraces and is embraced by this oneness opposes what is not embraced by it and is opposed by whatever or whoever doesn’t welcome the Divine Embrace that is the Trinity. Because Jesus knows the world needs the ones the Father has given to him and that they will face opposition both inside and outside themselves, He asks the Father not “to take [the ones He has given to the Son] out of the world but to keep them “from the evil one” because “[t]hey do not belong to the world anymore than [the Son] belong[s] to the world (John 17:9, 15).

The Son opened the Way to eternal life, and He leads us to it by his life, death, and resurrection. Thanks to his life, death, and resurrection, we are invited into the same embrace of the Trinity in which He lives. I invite this Love of the Trinity into my heart as I join my prayer to the one Jesus offers in John 17.

As another closing prayer, I’m looking to what is sometimes called “St. Patrick’s Breastplate Prayer” because, according to the version of this prayer that’s included with the Hallow app, it is prayed in Ireland not only on St. Patrick’s Day but on Trinity Sunday.

Deliver us deliver us from evil, Lord and protect us in times of temptation. Amen.

The Bible. The New American Bible Revised Edition, Kindle edition, Fairbrother, 2011.

Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Inc. “Sunday July, 2 2023: Readings at Mass.” The New American Bible, 2001. Universalis for Windows, Version 2.179, Universalis Publishing Ltd., 26 Feb. 2023, https://universalis.com/n-app-windows.htm

Slanz, Julianne, “Lorica of St. Patrick.” Hallow, 17 March 2023, https://hallow.com/prayers/1016394.

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It Plays Over Everything

Posted in Reflections on Scripture, tagged , , , , , on June 17, 2022| 3 Comments »

Photo by Tim Sessinghaus on Unsplash

We often hear about the Trinity, but what does the Trinity mean? In “The Mystery of the Trinity,” Father Richard Rohr explains it like this:

“Christians believe that God is formlessness (the Father), God is form (the Son), and God is the very living and loving energy between those two (the Holy Spirit). The three do not cancel one another out. Instead, they do exactly the opposite.”

In “Images of the Trinity,” he adds,

“[T]he three Persons of the Trinity empty themselves and pour themselves out into each other. Each knows they can empty themselves because they will forever be refilled To understand this mystery of love fully, we need to “stand under” the flow and participate in it. It’s infinite outpouring and infinite infilling without end. It can only be experienced as a flow, as a community, as a relationship, as an inherent connection.”

All of creation reveals this relationship—”from atoms, to ecosystems, to galaxies,” The shape of God, Father Richard writes in “The Mystery of the Trinity,” is the shape of everything in the universe! Everything is in relationship and nothing stands alone.”

“Everything is in relationship and nothing stands alone.”

Father RICHARD ROHR

I’d say the first reading (Proverbs 8:22-31) and the psalm (Psalm 8:4-9) from this past weekend reflect this understanding, especially Proverbs 8:27-31 and Psalm 8:4-9. The psalm excerpt begins with:

When I behold your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars which you set in place—
What is man that you should be mindful of him,
or the son of man that you should care for him?

Psalm 8:4-5

The psalmist marvels at all the wonder his senses can take in, and he’s in awe of his experience that despite being reflected in all that grandeur, God also cares about the smallest components of the natural world and every single human being, too.

I love the way Proverbs assures us that God does, indeed, care about aspects of our lives that may seem to us to be insignificant. In that book, wisdom speaks about itself, saying:

I was his delight day by day,
playing before him all the while,
Playing over the whole of his earth,
having my delight with human beings.

Proverbs 8:30-31

Works cited

The Bible. The New American Bible Revised Edition, Kindle edition, Fairbrother, 2011.

Rohr, Richard. “Images of the Trinity.” Center for Action and Contemplation, 12 Jan. 2022, https://cac.org/daily-meditations/images-of-the-trinity-2022-01-12/. Accessed 17 June 2022.

—. “The Mystery of the Trinity.” Center for Action and Contemplation, 9 Jan. 2022, https://cac.org/daily-meditations/the-mystery-of-the-trinity-2022-01-09/. Accessed 17 June 2022.

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