The Trinity and Love

     Today, the Church celebrates one of its most confounding mysteries in the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity. It is beyond the human mind to fully reconcile how God can be one in substance but revealed through three distinct yet related persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. 

     God has left traces of His Trinitarian nature throughout creation. H2O is one substance yet it exists in three distinct states: as vapor, as liquid and as solid. Each of these states serve a purpose that the other states could not fulfill as perfectly. Steam cannot cool a drink like ice can, while chunks of ice falling from the sky would not satisfy a plant's needs as well as water. The same is true of God. Each of the three revealed persons of God satisfies a different purpose. God the Father reveals the majesty of splendor of the Supreme Being. God the Son demonstrates the forgiveness afforded to us. God the Holy Spirit sanctifies us and fulfills what the Lord says in todays Gospel: and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age. (Mt 28:20)


     While each person of the one God reveals something unique, They all point to one fact: that God loves us. Not only does He love us, but He loved us first. This often overlooked insight has tremendous implications. First, it allows us to love ourselves for who we are. God's love is not conditional on us loving Him in return. Nor does God force us to love Him; instead he grants us free will to choose whether to enter into a relationship of love. Once we realize that God personally cares not only for us but about us, it is easier to love ourselves, despite our imperfections.


      God's love also allows us to love others. Once we accept that we are loved despite our faults, it enables us to forgive the faults in others. How hypocritical and selfish we are when we deny forgiveness to someone else! Imagine if God treated us as we treat each other. As the psalmist notes, if thou, O Lord, should mark iniquities, Lord, who could stand? But there is forgiveness with thee. (Ps 130:3-4)


     The Trinity will never be fully understood until we arrive at full communion with God in Heaven. Until then, you and I will do well to grapple with what has been revealed to us; namely, that God is love, and He desires us to share that love with all we come in contact with, regardless of their disposition to receive it.