Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity

Link to Mass Readings: http://www.usccb.org/nab/061911.shtml

“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.”

Today is the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, and we are called to meditate on that mystery. We believe in 1 God in 3 Persons, where there is only One God, but God has a Son; we believe also in the Holy Spirit “which proceeds from the Father and the Son, and with the Father and Son is worshipped and glorified.”

It’s heady stuff; what the Trinity means has been a subject of study ever since the Resurrection, and will be so until the end of the world. But at its most basic, it means love. Love does not exist in a vacuum, love does not exist between one person and themselves. But God is Love, and so much so that He must exist as the Trinity.

God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are all one Being, and have always existed, none before the other. “I believe in Jesus Christ our Lord, begot and not made, one being with the Father.” We believe that even though Jesus is the Son of God, there was no time when Jesus was not. One of the hardest things to understand is that the Trinity has always existed as the Trinity, always One, always 3 Persons.

What is the Holy Spirit? My favorite description of the Holy Spirit is that the love between God the Father and Jesus the Son is so real and powerful and alive that it exists as the Holy Spirit. Because it is God, this Love is God as well.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.” If God is Love, and the Trinity is fundamentally about Love, and the Holy Spirit is a Love so real it is God, how strongly are we loved! Everyone knows the verse John 3:16, but its familiarity blinds us sometimes to scale of love involved. God sacrificed His Son to save the world, the Son whom He loves so much that the Love between them is God.

If love could be approximated in terms of size, God does not love us with buckets of love, or mountains of love. He doesn’t love us with continents, or worlds, or galaxies of love. He loves us with more than universes of love, He loves us with God’s amount of Love, and that amount is incomprehensible.

The Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity reminds us to think about who God is. We get busy worrying about our lives and the lives around us, and we forget who it is we worship. We worship God, the Trinity of Love. God does not just love the world, but each of us individually, to the point that He knows the hairs on our heads. He loves us with a God’s Love, and today we remember that and what that means.