When God made you and me God embraced us like a mother would bundle up a beloved child to go out into the cold for the very first time. And like a parent might slip a little identification note into a child’s pocket, just in case he or she should get lost, God put a little piece of Godself inside of each of us. That little piece of God is our immortal soul - it is the presence of Christ within us. Life is the journey of our soul back home to God.
‘God’ is a word that we use to describe an indefinable reality. Because our minds and bodies operate in time and space, we are only comfortable thinking and speaking with intellectual constructs. We make our Creator into our own image and likeness. We paint pictures, cut stained-glass images, and sing songs about a transcendent reality that cannot be packaged into the limited box of human understanding.
But what the intellect struggles to grasp, the soul already knows. I intuitively know that there is a central, loving, and personal source of all creation. I know this because God embraced me before I was born.
In the New Testament Saint John tells us that, “God is Love.” Back in the 1970s, Carole King wrote a song entitled: ‘OnlyLove is Real, Everything Else An Illusion’. For me this song speaks of God.
God is love, a pure love that permeates the universe; a love that draws us home. We Christians use an intellectual construct in attempting to describe the dynamic of that pure Love. That construct is the Trinity.
The Benedictine theologian Kilian McDonnell gave us a model he calls the Trinitarian Cycle of Life. Father McDonnell uses this analogy to describe the underlying Trinitarian dynamic that flows throughout the universe. In this dynamic God as Father reaches through God as Son and in God as Holy Spirit to touch and transform the world and the church and to lead us back home.
We are part of that dynamic. God sent each of us into life to be a conduit of God’s love; to help that love permeate our world. The Trinity is the unbroken cycle of God’s love.
On Trinity Sunday, and everyday, let us remember and rejoice, really rejoice, that we are part of that cycle.
