Entrance Antiphon
“Benedictus sit Deus Pater, unigenitusque Dei Filius, Sanctus quoque Spiritus, quia fecit nobiscum misericordiam suam.”
“Father,
You sent your Word to bring us truth
and your Spirit to make us holy.
Through them we come to know the mystery of your life.
Help us to worship you, one God in three Persons,
by proclaiming and living our faith in you.
We ask you this, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
one God, true and living, for ever and ever.”
As a young priest, I can remember sweating the homily preparation for Trinity Sunday. I can also remember listening to more than one young priest and deacon stumbling through a homily on this day, which obviously either had him frightened or embarrassed. For the longest time I always thought that this discomfort on the part of young preachers had something to do with the fact that on this Sunday above all others we owed our listeners an accessible homily on this great mystery of our faith. We owed them a homily which had a genuine theological content. It was like all those notes and classes in the seminary which had only been maybe half or half-heartedly studied had come home to haunt us once a year.
While I have no doubt that this day and our people deserve genuine theological content, I am beginning to wonder if that was the reason for our embarrassment. Although getting across the truth of the Oneness in Three to the person in the pew is a real challenge, I have become more convinced now in my later years that once the first task is accomplished it is the second which causes the preacher to fear and to tremble. Once the notion has been imparted, it would seem that the preacher is obliged to make the Trinity come alive and set his listeners on the great journey hand in hand with the living and true God.
Recently, in a social setting and in conversation with a group of people (in other words, I’m not giving away any secrets) the topic of vocation came up and one of the ladies expressed what she understood by the words “God calls me” or even apart from vocation she explained to all in the group how she understands divine intervention. In a very real sense, it was an account of how she understands the teaching on the immanence of a God Who is transcendent. I could see that this good Catholic woman seems to have no appreciation for God as a Person having a personal interest in me, first, middle and last name. My point today is that I am sure she is not alone in having worked things out this way. Two ideas or notions seemed to dominate hers and many others (perhaps even some priests’) notion of God’s involvement in our world: a) He has an eye for detail; b) vocation is my choice to go with His flow, so to speak. Asking a question or two, allowing another person in the group that evening to lay out a vision similar to mine about a personal God being interested in a personal me from all eternity found no resonance with her at all. God was definitely other for her. The great dogma of the Trinity was certainly confessed in the words of the Creed by this woman, but “person” for her was person period. That cannot be: if person is person at all, it is relational; it is Person to person, it is first God to me and then me to God (and obviously Person to Person within the Godhead itself from all eternity), as it must be.
It’s not the academics of Trinity Sunday which should make the preacher sweat, but the challenge for once in the year beyond Christmas and Easter to do more than offer a moral message. St. Patrick’s shamrock as a visual aid for explaining Three in One is the catechetical first-step to sharing with folk the witness of prayer and closeness to God, where it was God Who sustained St. Patrick as a boy-captive forced to watch sheep on the hillsides of Ireland. The challenge of Trinity Sunday is to pull back the veil and let people see the face of God.
This year’s readings for the Solemnity bring this home in a most articulate way. In the First Reading from Exodus, God passes before Moses on Mount Sinai and Moses bows down to the ground at once and worships God. He says: “If I have indeed won your favor, Lord, let my Lord come with us, I beg.”
In Second Corinthians, St. Paul blesses his readers with a Trinitarian blessing, addressing them singly and as a communion of saints, wishing twice that God would be with them and of course with us. God is an identifiable God, first the God of love and peace, and then he continues naming the three Persons individually: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”
And above all: John’s Gospel Chapter 3 verse 16, Jesus speaking to Nicodemus struggling to understand and saying: “God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not be lost but may have eternal life.”
We are not plugging into or going along with a cosmic flow, we take the hand which is extended, we respond to a named Person Who calls us by our very own name.
I remember one of those funny words which professors were always using and using it, if I remember correctly, as if it were something negative and maybe even dangerous: “reify” or “reifying”. Websters doesn’t seem to have gotten that impression. The dictionary defines reify simply as: “to treat (an abstraction) as substantially existing, or as a concrete material object.” Maybe that is the problem and the challenge of Trinity Sunday. Perhaps for too many of us good Catholics God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, has been an abstraction, which we reduce to something concrete?
Maybe none of this is fair and there are really more profound theologians out there in the pew than there are in the pulpit? In any case, I encountered someone for whom the words “flow” or “source of energy” concretize a notion of person which is not person at all. For just one person, it would be worth the effort to sweat a bit of a Trinity Sunday and try to move beyond abstraction to encounter God as Person reaching out to me as person in more ways than I can count in a well crafted homily.
“Father,
You sent your Word to bring us truth
and your Spirit to make us holy.
Through them we come to know the mystery of your life.
Help us to worship you, one God in three Persons,
by proclaiming and living our faith in you.
We ask you this, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
one God, true and living, for ever and ever.”
Yes, Jesus loves me; God loves me, that person with a first, middle and last name. He loved me before I was even named. He called me into being, He calls me to know, love and serve Him in this life, so as to be happy with Him forever in Heaven. Person to person!
No comments:
Post a Comment