Summer Interns have arrived!  We are hosting three young women in June and July and two more in August.  The women come from different backgrounds and educations: this summer, several interns have come to us from divinity schools around the country.  At Redwoods, they participate in a different sort of school, a schola caritas (school of charity), as our founding Cistercian fathers of the 11th century called monastic life.

What word or words would we use to depict the mystery of the Holy Trinity, the mystery we are celebrating today?  The one essential word is ‘relationship’.  And endemic within relationship is the power of ‘love’.  The love reality is what makes relationship true, opening the heart, transforming, reflecting the face and life of God. The Holy Trinity reflects the relationship between Father and Son and the on-going revelation of their love bond is the Holy Spirit. 

‘Come Holy Spirit, kindle in us the fire of your love.’  Let us ponder: Is it not the fire of love that alone brings true and lasting change? 

We are still in the Easter season: the gospel reading of this Sunday and the gospel readings we heard during the week give us profound images for lectio, indeed for our lives. Some of these images are peace, abiding, the commandment of love, and the vine.  In emphasizing that these words are images helps us to see the depth of their meaning, a meaning which is expansive and will continue to illicit life as we encounter them in prayer. 

We meet the Risen One in the encounter of love, an encounter that includes forgiveness, receiving a deeper, fuller truth, and a way of being that is broader than the one we are living now.  The encounter is about meeting the One who ‘makes all things new’, new in seeing, new in terms of a fresh perspective on how God meets us and enters our lives, new in terms of how we see ourselves and our sister and brother.