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The Catholic Telegraph
May 24, 2002The liturgical celebration of the Holy Trinity, unlike Easter or even Christmas, is not an ancient observance in the Church. In fact, it was made a mandatory part of the Church’s liturgical calendar only in 1334. Before that, it was thought that there didn’t need to be a special day for honoring the Holy Trinity since the Trinity is sufficiently honored daily in the ongoing, ordinary prayer life of the Church.
Most of the liturgical year is concerned with reflecting on the life and ministry of Jesus. Special celebrations of a single mystery (like the Trinity which we celebrate on this Sunday or the Eucharist which we commemorate next Sunday) are outside the general pattern. Nonetheless, these "special" celebrations do have a place in the Church’s community life. They call to our attention the fundamental realities that underlie our whole Christian existence and that energize it as it moves forward to the kingdom’s final fulfillment.
This feast’s second reading for year A comes from the very end of Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians. It is a short reading in two parts.
First of all, Paul calls on the Corinthians to live together in unity and peace, to take joy in their life in the Lord, to be forgiving, agreeable, and encouraging toward one another. They were to reach out to one another and be aware that the whole church was embracing them. All this would guarantee the presence in their midst of the love and peace of God. (What Paul calls for here is particularly significant when we recall that the Corinthian church was beset with factionalism and interpersonal tensions.)
Next comes a final blessing, cast in Trinitarian form. He prays for grace from Christ, love from the Father, and fellowship from the Holy Spirit for all his readers. (Scholars point out that this is one of the clearest Trinitarian passages in the New Testament. That would seem to account for its selection for this Sunday’s feast.)
It took several centuries of reflection and discourse for the Church to be able to enunciate its belief about the Trinity in a clear and unequivocal way. While the New Testament authors do seem to have some instinctive grasp of the ideas of person and nature that would be more precisely defined in future centuries, they speak of the Trinity more often in experiential terms.
We, too, relate to the Trinity in the context of prayer rather than in the terms of dogmatic definition. In fact, directing ourselves toward the Trinity constitutes the basic fabric of our corporate prayer life. We generally begin our prayer with "the sign of the cross." The action is indeed a cross, but the words are a commitment to the Trinity of what we are about to begin. Two of the three greetings that are provided for the beginning of the celebration of Mass are Trinitarian, one of them being a direct quote from our reading. The priest’s presidential prayers in the Eucharist are generally addressed to the Father and conclude with an allusion to the mediation of the Son and the Holy Spirit. Most Catholics know the little "Glory be to the Father ..." prayer. This may be the most frequently used prayer of the Church’s liturgy, since it comes at the end of every psalm and canticle and a couple of other times besides in the liturgy of the hours, so that those who recite the breviary pray it some fifteen times a day.
The Church guides us to keep in touch with the Trinity in our prayer because the Trinity constitutes the basic reality with which our salvation is concerned. It is the source of our being and our redemption. It is the context in which our Christian life unfolds. It is the goal toward which our human destiny is directed.
We find it hard to think and speak with full theological correctness about the Trinity. Even professional theologians choose their words carefully when they deal with the relationships between the Persons and with the predication of qualities to the Persons and to the divine nature, not to mention more esoteric aspects of the Trinity like perichoresis and the communication of idioms.
Yet we also feel an instinctive comfort in dealing with the Trinity. We are at home with the three divine Persons and the one divine nature. We know that through the Trinity we are involved with generosity and love and fellowship. We know that the Trinity is involved with us in creation and salvation and the final life in the Lord that we look forward to at the end of our earthly journey. Our experience in prayer with the Trinity teaches us that God is not solitary, inert, detached, self-centered, but rather that God involves community, communication, self-sharing, unity in love, that God is all-powerful, all-expressive, all-embracing. We are grateful that God has struggled to explain Himself to us through the life and teaching of Jesus, but we also know that we only understand enough to be able to say that God is infinitely more than we can grasp.
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Conversation Questions.
What part does the Trinity play in my prayer life?
How does the Church’s teaching about the Trinity enable me to relate to God more closely?
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