Trinity Sunday - Homily 3

Homily 3 - 2015

I find that I make sense of God as Trinity as I make sense of my personal life trajectory across the years. I started off as a little baby, as real and as human as my mother and father, but with absolutely no sense of who or what I was. Over time my awareness, my consciousness, began to develop, and I had some sense of who I was. But if were asked, Who are you? I would have had no answer, beyond, perhaps, my ability to give my name. But my name says nothing of who I am. It labels me, but it is not who I am. With more time, I become more conscious of my self. I am me, and I can say excitedly to mum, “Mummy, look at me!” – but I know little about this precious me. 

With more time, I begin to feel a bit anxious about this me, insecure in this world of unpredictable and powerful adults. And as I go to pre-school or kinder, I feel my peers as competitors or even threats to this me, and I embark on a process of trying to make myself someone. Instead of being my self, I try to become a self-made man; in the process, constantly judging myself and frantically trying to make myself better, certainly to look better, than who I vaguely feel I am. This process, this making myself the self-made man or woman, can go on right through adolescence and adulthood. I have an alternating love/hate relationship to my self-made self, and my true self slips easily off the radar… until the crunch comes, often about mid-life, with some trauma or unexpected moment of insight, and I have to face the truth. The possibility presents itself, perhaps for the first time, to discover my true self, and to unmask my false self. With the possibility comes the decision – to make peace at last with the me whom I discover or to keep up trying to strengthen the façade of the false me. If I choose to accept what is, with time, I can begin to love that true me, seeing there the unique image of God that I am and, what is equally [or perhaps more] wonderful, beginning to see everyone else as the other unique images of God that they are. That experience becomes progressively more wonderful and joyful! So over life, the trajectory can move from existence, to consciousness, to love, to joyful wonder.

As Christians, we believe that we are all made in the image of God. We inherit, as it were, the DNA of God. So, like ourselves, we can view the mystery that is God as being, knowing, loving and rejoicing. Nine centuries ago, there was a theologian teaching at a university near Paris. His name was Richard, and the university was called St.Victoire. On one occasion he wrote: "To be truth, God must be one; to be love, God must be two; to be joy, God must be three.” Chew on that over the week!! The First Person is, and knows. The Second is the Self, known by the First - the consciousness, as it were, of God, or the self-revelation, or what St John called the Word. The First and Second Persons, recognizing their truth and beauty, love that one truth and beauty. But that love is something more, a shared love, an embrace, a dance; and from that ecstatic mutual embrace or dance of love comes an energetic, explosive, creative joy that is the Spirit of them both.

Our faith in Trinity calls us to know ourselves. It calls us to love the unique image of God that we discover reflected there in and as ourselves. It offers us the unbounded joy that fills us as we surrender to that never-stopping dance of love that is the life of God.