Holy Trinity

Holy Trinity Sunday – June 7, 2020

Frackville, From the Pastor /

Aristotle famously said that human beings are political animals. By that, he didn’t mean that we all belong to political parties or have certain ideologies. In his terms Aristotle meant that we are designed to live in community. He thought that the basic unit of human society was the family, and several families gathering together made the polis, or basic political unit. We learn by imitating others and being taught by others. We love telling stories, we have a need to create, and we build and trade. As well as this social aspect, we can also have a rich interior life. We can imagine, have daydreams and capture in our minds the essence of things. As somebody once said, we are the only animals who keep diaries to record and reflect on our inner life.

God is eternally one, but also a communion of Persons. The interior life of God, if we may put like that, is the eternal communion of love between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: one sole God in essence, with three distinct Persons. Here we have to exercise our spiritual muscles to receive the reality of the Trinity, where, in the words of St. Athanasius: “In that Trinity there is no before or after, nothing greater or lesser: because the three Persons are co-eternal and equal among themselves.” So we are social creatures because God is communion. We are rational creatures because the divine Trinity is the fountain of all reason, order and intelligence.

God does more than create us; we are also redeemed. God could have redeemed us with just a word of command. But God wishes to enter into the life of God’s beloved creatures to heal and raise them to participate, by grace, in the divine, eternal life. So great is God’s desire to share communion with us that Jesus Christ, who is both divine and human, was prepared to suffer and die on the cross to communicate that love. Jesus also sent the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost to dwell within the Church, and dwell within each one of the baptized. In fact, the whole of the Trinity dwells within us when we live a sacramental life in the Church, when we pray, in our life of good works. We are made for communion, communion with each other and communion with God.

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Most Holy Trinity (“A”) – June 11, 2017

From the Pastor /

We cannot actually know God fully. Our attempts to get a grasp on God by natural reflection are better at telling us what God is not rather than what God is. The Church always taught there is no contradiction between the God of reason and the God of faith, but our faith takes us into realms of perception and imagination that reason struggles with. The mystery of the Holy Trinity emerged gradually in the Church’s thinking and teaching, and there have been many different ways of reflecting on it. What God reveals to us is always for our salvation. That is why God the Father sends His Son into the world. The Son has come not to condemn the world but so that through Him the world might be saved. We, His followers, are the ones who proclaim that message and who try in our lives to live out the pattern of truth and love expressed in the mystery of His own life which God has shared with us.

When things go wrong in our lives, when we lose our jobs, fall ill or have any sort of trial or tribulation, we need those who are close to us to hold us and help to offer each other excitement and adventure, risk and new horizons, challenge and inspiration.

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Most Holy Trinity (“C”) – May 22, 2016

From the Pastor /

The Spirit of God lives in the Church and in each person. This is the gift and the promise that the Lord made to us. And so if we turn to the Spirit and ask for guidance and inspiration our prayer will not go unheeded. We will be given sensitivity to the needs of others and a loving desire to help them. These gifts of the Spirit are all forms of “seeing” and once we see, we will not know how to act. St. Paul in his life journey, was given new sight by the Lord after being struck blind on the Damascus road. His new sight proved to be tremendous vision. He could see the glory of God ahead of him as our glorious destination. He could also see that even our sufferings can be beneficial events in our life, that we can bring good out of them. Suffering leads to patience, and patience leads to perseverance, and perseverance to hope, and our hope will not deceive us. The brightness of God now blesses our lives and calls us to bless one another, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

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Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity – May 31, 2015

From the Pastor /

In our readings is a message that takes us to the heart of why, as Christians, we do everything “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” These words tell us about God’s abiding love for us, God’s presence with us, and the mission that God calls us to. The risen Jesus, taking leave of His disciples at His ascension, not only says, “I am going to prepare a place for you;” but also, as Matthew records, instructs His followers to go out and make disciples.

It is all too easy on Trinity Sunday to content ourselves with naming the Trinity as “mystery” and then go about our business as normal. The Trinity tells us who we are, as baptized people; it opens us the riches of prayer and intimate life with God; it assures us of God’s closeness to us as we go out to do God’s work in the world. In practice, then, simply to begin each day “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” is to enter, day by day, more deeply into this mystery of love. From such prayer we can find small but powerful ways of living the mission of the Trinity in our lives. Let’s find moments in the coming week where, like God who is Trinity, we can go out to others in love, knowing God is with us in all things.

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Solemnity of the Holy Trinity – “A” – June 15, 2014

From the Pastor /

Not so very many years ago a senior priest in Scotland believed he should preach one very difficult and theologically complex sermon each year, for the good of the congregation. He invariably chose Trinity Sunday for this, Unfortunately, his plan didn’t work very well, as his congregation never understood what he was talking about at any time!

There is a famous story about St. Augustine – although there is no record that Augustine himself actually told it, and it is only known from the 13th century. The story goes that Augustine was sitting on a beach, trying to grasp the mystery of the Trinity, when he saw a small boy with a seashell collecting water from the sea and pouring it into a holy in the sand, returning to the sea for more water, and so on. Distracted by this, St. Augustine asked him, “What are you doing?” The child answered, “I’m going to pour the entire ocean into this hole.” “That is impossible; the whole ocean will not fit in the hole you have made,” said St. Augustine. The boy replied, “And you cannot fit the Trinity into your tine little brain.”

The complexities of the theology of the Trinity will always be beyond the human mind, because we gather today to celebrate the Most Holy Trinity – not to understand it. Our entire liturgy is wrapped up in the Trinity – our prayer is addressed to God the Father, through Jesus Christ His Son, both of whom live and reign in unity with the Holy Spirit, one God, three persons.

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