Becoming the Trinity

The doctrine of the Trinity is the summary statement of faith in the God of Jesus Christ. Even though God ‘dwells in light inaccessible,’ Christ is the visible icon of the invisible God, making tangible wishing human history and within human personality the ineffable mystery of God. The Spirit, present and active in creation from the very beginning, leads all creation back to its origin, God.

- Catherine Mowry LaCugna

Reading recently about the attacks by Israeli militias on food and medical supplies destined for the starving refugees of Gaza, about the genocidal attacks against women and children in Darfur, and about the dissolution of Haiti under gang leadership, I was drawn back to a book I read more than two decades ago, describing the once unimaginable Rwandan massacres, “We Regret to Inform You That Tomorrow We Shall Be Killed With All Our Families.” This book’s title comes from a letter written to a pastor by a member of his congregation, who did not know that the pastor, at that very moment, was leading the group who was about to massacre the writer and his family. Indeed, throughout the book, there are countless stories of priests and ministers, religious women and lay leaders betraying the people with whom they worshipped—giving up their neighbors and their companions to the forces of race-hatred and the pressure of mob rule. In one particularly heartbreaking story, two Rwandan religious sisters—two nuns—were convicted of genocide for participating in the killing and burning of people who had come to them, originally, for refuge and protection. That vowed religious, dedicated to the faith of Jesus, could be involved in such horrendous acts as these should not, I suppose, surprise me—and today, sadly, it likely would not. Yet, reading this passage again, I am still struck by the defense, offered by the nuns for their actions: “We did what we could reasonably do in the situation. We are not heroes; we are just ordinary women.”

“We are not heroes; we are just ordinary women.” What an odd thing to say after helping hack to death and then burn hundreds of men, women, and children. What a strange, sad world in which we live, when people see such collusion with death as part of the “ordinary;” when people who call themselves faithful Christians or Jews or Muslims cannot find the courage to choose life, cannot recognize that sometimes heroism is the only stance possible if we are to live honestly as children of God. It seems impossible to imagine that people of faith could behave in such a way. Yet, if we are honest with ourselves, has not this very way of thinking become the norm in the years since the Rwandan massacre so shocked our senses? And not just in the “undeveloped world” but in the so-called “civilized” nations, as well? 

With the rendition of prisoners and the torture of detainees, with drone attacks on civilian areas and barbed wire strung in the waters Rio Grande, with Christian leaders blessing guns before the altar and evangelical pastors supporting the genocidal policies of Mr. Putin, have we not all justified ourselves by citing our fear and claiming that we have done what we “reasonably” could do? But what if something more than reason is demanded of us? What if we are made to be something more than merely ordinary? What if, at the very ground of our being, there is a grace and a power that calls us, moves us, empowers us to be as Christ Jesus was: to be women and men capable of the Cross, destined for the Resurrection? What then?

This week, the Church celebrates the feast of the Most Holy Trinity—the recognition of a doctrine we may well acknowledge as central to our faith, but which tends to leave us all a bit glassy-eyed when we are asked to think about it. The Trinity is a mystery, we assert. Thus, there is nothing we can say about it that will make much sense, and even less about it that has any effect on our life in the world. All of which may be true, so long as we think of the Trinity only as a description of the metaphysics of God—i.e., three persons in one being—and not, also, as description of God’s action.

St. Ignatius once wrote—in what could well be one of the great descriptions of the Trinity— “Love consists in the mutual sharing of goods, for example, the lover gives and shares with the beloved what he possesses.” For the Trinity is not a thing to be understood so much as it is an experience of God’s active love in the universe. From all eternity, the Father loves, not in mere emotion, but in life-giving action—constantly pouring out the fullness of his very self, i.e. his Spirit, upon the beloved Son. And the Son, returning fully that love, i.e. that Spirit which he has received, gives back to the Father all that he is. This cycle of gift and return, this eternal cycle of love, is the life of God—the life which springs forth in all that love can create: in the beauty of the universe; in the complexity of biology and the simplicity of mathematics; in the life of every woman and man, made in the image and likeness of God, to love and live as God does. This cycle of love is the Trinity, is God, and is the mystery of life into which we are invited, and with which we are all empowered.

What God desires for us is what God lives in the depths of the Trinity—that each of us might receive, that each of us might become, the fullness of God. God desires us and draws us, with all creation, into the eternal cycle of gift and return. This desire becomes visible in the world itself, charged with the power of the Holy Spirit and glory of God. It is seen in the Incarnation of Jesus, whose message of love is his presence among us, and whose gift to us is not in words or things alone, but in his own body and blood—given on the Cross at Calvary and then, sacramentally, in the Eucharist. Far from reasonable or ordinary, God desires us to be more than ourselves, to be in communion with God; just as God—Father, Son, and Spirit—is eternally in their eternal communion of life-giving love, of redemptive grace, and generative mercy.

What keeps us, then, from living in the communion of the Trinity? It is not that the Trinity is a mystery, for the Trinity is a mystery not in the sense that it has parts that are unknown—it is not like a murder mystery where we have not yet picked up all the clues. Rather, the Trinity is a mystery because it is unfathomable—because, like all love, the more deeply one enters into the life of the Trinity, the more depth and richness one discovers. No, it is not the mystery that keeps us from living as people of the Trinity, but our own fears and hesitancies.

As Scripture says, “The love of God has been poured into our hearts,” but our hearts refuse to receive it. We block this gift with thoughts of vengeance dressed up as justice, with cruelty and cowardice dressed up as self-preservation, with our conviction that we are just “ordinary” and so cannot love as we have been loved. We live with hearts so full of fear for what we might lose, and with malice that rises from that fear, that we cannot surrender to God the fullness of our hearts.  

But God will not give up. In Jesus, who surrendered himself fully to God on the Cross, God has brought our humanity irrevocably into the divine circle of gift and return. We have moved into the unfathomable waters of love, and that mystery is now our mystery. Nothing in this world—not war, nor greed, nor terrorism, nor pettiness, nor all the ideologies of cowardice and cruelty—will overcome the Trinity that lives in us, for as Jesus says, “I have conquered the world.” Thus, the life of the Trinity will unfold, a little more, every time we overcome fear to offer love or to receive love; every time we join with Jesus in lifting up the fallen, in showing compassion to the poor, in forgiving those who cannot earn forgiveness; every time we allow ourselves to be what we are meant to be but cannot be alone: extraordinary women and men, alive and life-giving, through the love and grace of our Trinitarian God.

Fr. John Whitney S.J.