Chapter Talk – Trinity Sunday – June 12, 2022, cycle-C
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. The Son reveals the source of love, his Abba, and the Holy Spirit breathes forth the incarnate reality of Christ, his consciousness, his Gospel word, the gift of his very self, given through his way of ‘loving to the end’. The embodiment of this agape love is the Holy Trinity.
Pope Benedict XVI wrote: “Each of the three Persons of the Trinity points to the other two. In this circle of love flowing and intermingling, there is the highest degree of unity and constancy and this in turn gives unity and constancy to everything that exists” (Seeking God’s Face, p.45). Pope Benedict goes on to say that while this statement might appear to us as “remote from the reality of our own lives”, he points out that this Divine pattern reflects a reality “that touches all human decisions” (p.46). In fact, dear sisters, we are stamped with this Divine patterning, this ‘circle of love flowing and intermingling’ within our depths.
Holy Trinity: to repeat, we learn to know this mystery inside and out through Christ. The Carmelite, Sr. Constance Fitzgerald, wrote: “The Dark Night of contemplative prayer is about being grasped by God, transformed; it’s about having the familiar boundaries of our souls stretched and stretched so that we become more and more capable of holding within ourselves the full relational life of Jesus Christ” (August 11, 2017). Jesus embodies the full relational life of the Trinity. As we grow into his mind and heart, and consciousness, we are ‘stretched and stretched’ so that Christ’s love in us deepens and expands to include even those who are different than us and that we put labels upon…Authentic relationship means that the ‘boundaries of our souls’ need to expand and to be stretched…we are never finished with this inner ‘conversion’, the expanding of our horizons. If we just review our lives: where have I put restrictions, limitations, negative judgements on a relationship? To enter the ‘full relational life of Christ’ means we will be stretched, our hearts will be broken open more to both receive and to offer forgiving love, to ‘love to the end’, giving ourselves for the sake of Divine life and to spread Christ’s word by our very lives. What we learn from Christ is that the self-gift offered and given daily is what places us in the heart of Trinitarian love. Each Eucharist we experience Christ’s gift of self to us. And each Eucharist calls us ever so silently to do as he did, knowing that this self-offering is motivated by love and will be sustained by love.
Fr. Simeon in his homily for today’s solemnity underscores this: “What is, then, the practical conclusion we ought to draw from the majestic mystery of the Most Holy Trinity, the central article of our faith? I suggest the following: If we—as Trinitarian communicators of life who have received the Holy Spirit into us—do not pour out our lives in selfless service, infusing God’s Breath into the breathless and loving them with God’s own creative Love, now active within us,then we will be denying in practice what we proclaim in word and rite: namely, that the God who indwells us, and whom we worship and glorify, is for us a revitalizing Trinity of Persons.” To know with our heart and mind this love at the center of Trinitarian life is experienced each time we ‘pour out our lives in selfless service’…we can feel the love, God’s love that we are loving with…and then we can only go down on our knees in gratitude for this eternal gift of our God. Amen.
Sr. Kathy DeVico, Abbess
