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A Missionary Disciple and the Gift of God

The disciples of the Risen Lord are missionary.  They are sent out by Him into the world to be messengers of Divine Mercy, and their teaching is not their own. They know that they have been entrusted with a pearl beyond price, the mustard seed, the one thing that does not fail when all else fails around them. They declare what they have heard because what they hear has turned their whole world upside down and given them ground on which to stand, rock on which to build, “If you knew the Gift of God.”

They are sent out because the One sent to them commands them.  Raised from their sight, and at the same time, always mysteriously present in new and surprising ways, they follow in the footsteps of their Crucified Master.  Their mission is to reveal His love in the face of alienation and hostility, to bring action filled words of hope into hopeless situations, to propose and re-propose faith for eyes yet unable to glimpse the glory of God. In all this and so much more, they long to satisfy the great thirst by which Christ cries out, “If you knew the Gift of God.”

The One who conquered death asks the Father to send Tongues of Fire to these disciples whom He has sent. Thus, this Mysterious Breath from the Heart of Father and Son breathes in them, sealing the deepest interior of their hearts with the freedom to offer their lives in love. The Father and the Son have always delighted in this excess of joy because in sovereign freedom They forever seal their own love with this Consuming Fire.  Now in pure jubilation, because the Risen Lord has asked it and because all things are given Him, the frailest creature can also know this Uncreated Gift until one’s whole being echoes, “If you knew the Gift of God.”

Missionary disciples live by breathing in the Holy Spirit’s animating presence through which with great delicacy He lavishes on them spiritual gifts of every kind. New and unfamiliar wonders bathe these souls as their whole existence aches with both the exultation of heavenly canticles and the heart-piercing cry of the most vulnerable, the very same music resounding in the depths of God. In this symphony of truth, the true disciple discovers how to rest in the tenderness of God and, even more, how to be so tender with God that He might rest in them, “If you knew the Gift of God.”

The intensity with which the Fire of God’s Love burns in them is the same intensity that propels them out into the most painful of life’s problems.  Into the dangerous peripheries of society and into the troubled heart of a family, for the sake of both friends and enemies alike, the missionary disciple is not afraid to enter with the peace of Christ. Animated by the Spirit, these disciples breathe forth a hidden fruitfulness so super-abundant, this life is too short and limited to hold it all.  Even in their dying breath, one can hear them sing, “If you knew the Gift of God.”

A missionary disciple is a soul lit ablaze, a fiery icon of love and truth, a window through which the joy of heaven shines with life saving splendor. By making of their bodies a living sacrifice, true spiritual worship, such missionary souls offer divine warmth, light and life to a cold, dark and dying world. Through these generous souls, even when brutally rejected and scorned unto death, the joy from on high is revealed here below, especially where it is most needed.  Because they have sung sealed with the Holy Spirit, others now sing “If you know the Gift of God.” 

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As if Already in Eternity: The Wisdom of Blessed Elisabeth of the Trinity

Saint Elisabeth of the Trinity is a witness to the primacy of contemplation in the life of the Church and the mystical wisdom contemplation releases into human history.  This is the wisdom that understands how God is present in both the public square as well as in the intimacy of our hearts.   Today, when the whole world needs this wisdom renewed, the Church celebrates her feast day and invites us to consider her powerful spiritual doctrine.

She wrote a famous prayer to the Holy Trinity that has helped many contemplatives recover devotion to the Divine Persons in their life of prayer.  This work is cited to support the  Catechism of the Catholic Church’s teaching on the Divine Works and the Trinitarian Missions.  The teaching itself is that God calls every individual to a great and beautiful purpose, to become a dwelling place for His presence in the world:

The ultimate end of the divine economy is the entry of God’s creatures into the perfect unity of the Blessed Trinity.  But even now we are called to be a dwelling for the Most Holy Trinity, ‘If a man loves me,’ says the Lord, ‘he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him, and make our home with him’ (CCC 260).

This is a rich teaching because it says that our ultimate fulfillment is not simply something waiting for us in a remote future, in a distant afterlife.  Instead, the Catechism proposes that heaven can begin now in faith.   This means that our faith offers us a fullness of life.  We do not have to be content with managing through life’s ambiguities and uncertainties with the hope that someday it might get better.  Instead, our faith gives us a real foretaste of the fullness that awaits us — so that the excessiveness of God’s love can pour into our lives here and now, if we will believe in Him.

To encourage this decision to believe in the love that God has for us in the here and now of our lives, the Catechism cites the beginning of Blessed Elisabeth’s prayer to the Trinity, “O my God, Trinity whom I adore, help me to forget myself entirely so to establish myself in you, unmovable and peaceful as if my soul were already in eternity.”

Blessed Elisabeth’s prayer helps us consider what it means to have faith, to believe in God and what He calls us to become.  This kind of faith is a matter of a love that takes us out of ourselves. It is, in this sense, an ecstatic movement of heart, a decision to lay aside everything so that there is space for God to dwell in us.  Faith helps us see that our own bloated egos need to make way for God.  To love Christ to the point of welcoming His word in our hearts means He can begin to help us forget our very self.  He is the One who frees us so that the fullness of life that awaits us in heaven begins here on earth.

Her words suggest that the biggest obstacle to prayer is not anything outside ourselves, but proclivities within.   The ego has its own specific gravity.  Its force, if left unchecked, its deadly.  Anxieties over our own plans and for security, our lust for control and to put others in their place, our need to be right and esteemed, our obsession with being liked or affirmed, our gluttony for comfort and entertainment; all of this fails to provide any firm ground for rectifying our existence.  Unchecked, these tendencies suffocate the heart, and as long as one’s heart is pulled by these forces, it can find no peace.

Only when we can get out of ourselves are we able to breath the fresh air of friendship with God and true solidarity with one another.   At the same time, even after we see how imprisoned we are, left to our own resources, we cannot entirely free ourselves.  The answer is not to be found in our own cleverness or in some Titanic effort to surmount oneself through techniques.  Only Christ can help us leave our old way of life behind.  This is why Blessed Elisabeth’s prayer begins with a cry for help.

Clinging to what Christ has revealed about the Father and about humanity, this is the essential movement of faith.  This is His word to us – for He is the saving Word that reveals this inexhaustible mystery.  Those whose hearts are vulnerable to this radiant beauty find true inner freedom.

Souls whom Christ helps to be free of themselves stand firm in love even as everything in life falls apart around them.  This is only because through Christ they have found the ground of their very being in the excessive love flowing from the Holy Trinity into their nights, their voids, their inadequacies and even their failures.  In short, come what come may they know they are loved and that love awaits them.

It by standing on this ground that a soul opens itself to God’s presence in ever new and surprising ways.  On this ground, He dwells in them.  With the inflow of His truth and love, it is easy to let go and to trust, and anyone who has discovered this freedom wants to be established there in an unmovable way.

Today is the feast of Blessed Elisabeth of the Trinity.  She lived out this truth to her last anguished heartbeat, bedridden with an incurable disease even as the political powers of her day threatened those she loved the most and the Church was rocked by all kinds of scandal.  This Carmelite Mystic, the Mystic of Dijon, believed her mission was to help souls enter to a transforming encounter with Christ, one that requires a journey out of ourselves where we are vulnerable enough to be touched by Him. Her words encourage us to call out to the Word, and to let His great Canticle of love resound in our hearts with all its fulness — for to know this saving truth is to live as if already in eternity.

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The Gift of the Holy Spirit

Pentecost is a Feast of Love.  It is the feast of the Canticle of Canticles where the Bridegroom comes to kiss his Bride. Today the Church cries out to her Bridegroom for a divine kiss, a kiss from the mouth of God.   It is this kiss entrusted to frail humanity that makes all the difference in the world and in our lives.  It is by this kiss that God discloses the depths of his love, that He surrenders His Holy Spirit to each of us in the most unique and particular way.   It is the kiss God entrusts to humanity from the Cross.

The Holy Spirit is the life of the soul.  He is the great gift that the Risen Lord breaths into the world.   When lovers kiss, it is as if they are trying to breath their spirits into each other.  Each wants the other to completely possess the gift of who they are.   It is by way of a holy kiss that Christ breaths his Holy Spirit into the Church.

The whole Church and each of us as members of this mystical Body, through this same Gift, want to give everything we have to Christ and find in ourselves the power to do so and the inner conviction that we do not want to have it any other way.  This is because with the Gift of the Holy Spirit we realize this is exactly the way God has loved us in Christ Jesus.

Wherever the Spirit blows, the most beautiful affections are ignited in our humanity.  The Spirit of the Father and the Son moves us with a passion so sacred that it raises us up above ourselves.  Such holy desires caused by the Fire of God in us allow us to participate in the very life of God.

The more humble we are, the more the kiss of Christ permeates the deep places of our hearts.  He won the right to enter into these deep places, to breath his Holy Spirit into these depths, by emptying Himself until he became like us.  In solidarity with our humanity, having embraced this most frail work of his creation to his Uncreated Nature in his Divine Person, He allowed himself be completely vulnerable to us – like a lover who attempts to disclose his love to the beloved.  Spurned and rejected from the beginning, He would not give up on the friendship He yearned to share with us.  He offered his kiss to a distrustful humanity by humbling Himself in the face of our pride and overcame our hostility to Him by his death.  When we gaze on Him who died for us, always we see His arms are wide open, ready to embrace us.  He waits to kiss us with the Gift of His Spirit whenever we allow our hearts to be pierced by his love.

Will we surrender to his kiss?  Will we allow ourselves to be caught up in his love?  True, the more we offer ourselves in love, we find ourselves dying to our old way of life. It is the pathway of surrender and trust. We are afraid of this — abandoning our old way of life leads somewhere with which we are not familiar. But the kiss of Christ is so beautiful, so life giving, it is worth this death a thousand times over.  Let Him kiss you with the Kisses of his Mouth! 

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You are a Temple of the Holy Spirit

Some points for prayer-
Since the Blessed Trinity is living in you, 
you are the temple of God.  
You are also a holocaust, a word of unending praise, 
a flower of great beauty offered up to God.   
Francis Xavier Cardinal Nguyen Van Thuan, 
The Road to Hope: A Gospel from Prison


Here there is an interiority, 
a depth which lies beyond the merely natural, 
as far beyond the natural depth of soul 
as the “realm” where God is enthroned, 
and where our “glory to God in the highest” seeks Him, 
and is beyond all thoughts and feelings of natural sublimity.  
This interiority has been given to us by Baptism, 
and now Christian practice must lift it 
beyond the natural world of feeling and thinking.  
Romano Guardini, 
Learning the Virtues that Lead you to God

The Father spoke one Word, which was his Son, 
and his Word he speaks always in eternal silence, 
and in silence must it be heard by the soul.  
St. John of the Cross, 
Sayings of Light and Love

In the heaven of her soul, the praise of glory 
has already begun her work of eternity.  
Her song is uninterrupted, 
for she is under the action of the Holy Spirit 
who effects everything in her; 
and although she is not always aware of it, 
for the weakness of nature does not allow her 
to be established in God without distractions, 
she always sings, she always adores, 
for she has, so to speak, 
wholly passed into praise and love 
in her passion for the glory of her God.
Blessed Elisabeth of the Trinity, 
Heaven in Faith
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The Trinity – the enchanting harmony of divine love

How can we describe the kind of contemplation devotion to the Trinity opens to us? One of the Fathers – if someone knows who it is, I cannot find my research on this observation but I think psuedo-Dionysius – contemplates an analogy of the Trinity with a musical chord – a perfect triad of notes from whose creative resonance all things flow. Like a musical chord which penetrates the depths of the heart, each Person freely acts with in the one freedom in the perfect harmony of one triune love – one note does not absorb the others nor do the parts of the chord cancel each other out. Contemplating the Trinity is like listing to music – in his Life of Moses, Gregory of Nyssa calls this the mysterious siren sound that echoed in the contemplation of the People of Israel encamped at Mt. Sinai. (See Exodus: 19:19.)

At this point, we might take our cue from Gregory of Nyssa who describes a resonance of heart in this mystery of the One and Three. Speaking to those about to be baptized, he explains his experience of God as his Divine Companion, “I have not even begun to think of unity when Trinity bathes me in its splendor. I have not even begun to think of the Trinity when unity grasps me. (Oratio 40.41 – as cited in Catechism of the Catholic Church #256)

In musical terms, we might describe his observation as follows: one cannot attend to any one of the triad notes without being taken up into their unity, and at the same time, one cannot attend to the captivating resonance of the triad without being overwhelm by the distinct quality of each note. The Father’s love for each of us revealed in Christ Jesus and communicated to us in the Holy Spirit is symphonic. It implies a range of harmonies that are beyond our power to hear – the very inner life of God, and yet it is our dignity to participate in by grace.

To participate in the music of God – this is to make of our life the praise of his glory. In the enjoyment of this perfect song of love, the heart contemplating it at once feels lost in a mystery that seems to completely absorb it — and curiously at the same time, feels at home, more distinctly itself than it has ever been before. Something like the Unity of nature and distinction of Persons in the mystery of the Trinity becomes the rhythm of its own heart in relation to God, and then curiously in relation to all those entrusted to it. Elisabeth of the Trinity explains throughout her writings that this is the great canticle we will sing without cease at the end of time, and that we begin to sing it even now in faith- its harmonies taking up the whole of our life and establishing the lyre of our hearts in the divine melody flowing from the very Heart of God.

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The Trinity our Home

When Elisabeth of the Trinity wrote a retreat for her sister, the first thing she did to encourage the young mother was to describe the Trinity as our home, the place where we out to dwell. Elisabeth knew that her sister would resonate with this image because she herself was making a home for her husband and infant children. When one is at home, one finds the space to be oneself and at the same time the freedom to give oneself in love. It is the eternal plan of the Father that each of us should discover in the unity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit this same freedom and space so that we might become whom He has predestined us to be from all eternity. For Elisabeth, this means finding our home in the Trinity allows us to become the praise of God’s glory. The Church affirms the mystery of the Three in One and One in Three because when we carefully ponder it, we are drawn by it into the very heart of our faith. In this reflection, we will ponder what it means to be “person,” in what way God is Three Persons and finally our need for communion with the Trinity.

To be person is to have the potential to be at once a gift for another and the possessor of the gift of another. We first experience the gift of another person’s love as an infant, and this experience forms us to give ourselves in love. A mother’s love surrounds us in the womb and when we come forth into the world, her breasts sustain us and her loving hands console us. St. Augustine explains that we do not have distinct memories of this experience. But these experiences nevertheless began to form us. As we encounter others beyond our mother, first and foremost, our father, we become aware of relationships – we distinguish ourselves from others and discover that they like us are free, and that this freedom can be used to love.

Yet from time primordial we have used this freedom very imperfectly to our own peril. But for the absence of love in our hearts where love ought to be, each of us would have been completely nurtured in love into adulthood. We know all to well that our noble desire for true friendship is subject to futility; and we are much too at home with our capacity to betray and deny our friendships — just as was done to us by those we most trusted to have loved us. We yearn for love we do not have, burdened with guilt for something beyond and behind our own guilty actions, and haunted by the thought of our own mortality.

The Divine Persons are not like any created person for they do not exist in the merely potential but live completely and always in the actual – They are an eternal now allowing each moment that we experience to exist for us. Mystics like Elisabeth of the Trinity emphasize that to love the Trinity is to begin to realize that eternal now already in time – their exceeding love for us creates the present moment and makes it a kind of sacrament in which we can find God. Yet this is only a beginning. Even if there are angelic powers that have always used their freedom to love perfectly – the perfection of that love is contingent on and circumscribed by the creative action of an eternal and unending act of love in which dwell the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The mutual freedom in love shared by each Divine Person in his distinct relations reveals a co-eternal ‘spiritual space’ at the heart of all true love.

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Corpus Christi

In recent posts, we have been reflecting on the Holy Trinity. This mystery of uncreated and eternal Love is the very source of our lives and of the whole universe. Understanding this changes the whole way we see reality. A purely secular world does not see meaning in things. For some, everything is just an illusion, a big game. For others, the distinct uniqueness of this sunrise, or that flower, or someone’s smile — such things can not fully be seen. In their wisdom, everything is caught up in one idea, one meaning – a meaning that absorbs and chokes out everything else. But for the believer, everything is filled with wonder and awe: it all comes from Love and is awaited by Love. Love treasures the unique and the distinct inexhaustible surprise of this person and this moment in this particular manifestation of creation because such things are lovable in the most unrepeatable and irreplaceable way. What is more, when we contemplate the Holy Trinity, we even see a kind of impatient, yearning love breaking through such things – the kind of love that can never be indifferent, that must go out and seek the beloved.

This is what we celebrate in Corpus Christi — the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ. Jesus is present in the Blessed Sacrament with a presence that fulfills his promise to be with us until the end of time. Jesus himself said that those who ate his Body and drank his Blood would have eternal life. Early Christian martyrs risked their lives to go to the Eucharist on Sundays, so dependent were they on the power that comes from communing with the Lord. The real presence of Christ, his Eucharistic presence, is so powerful that the ancient Christians considered Holy Communion “the medicine of immortality,” “the antidote for death, and “Journey Bread – Vaiticum” by which we live forever. See the Catechism of the Catholic Church #1405 http://www.nccbuscc.org/catechism/text/pt2sect2chpt1art3.shtml#vi.

The eucharistic procession for the solemn feastday brings out a certain aspect of this mystery of Christ’s presence among us. There is a tendency among some to call Christ’s real presence “static” or else a passive reality on our hearts and minds. But Christ’s presence is never static or passive. The Risen Lord, the Victor, is fully alive — inexhaustibly dynamic and active in his immortal and almighty love. He is on the move. The time is now. He has come searching for us – and it is his desire for us that stirs our yearning for Him.

He is always coming in a new way into our hearts, into our lives, and into our communities. All of creation, every moment is filled with the glory of his coming. Sometimes this glory is so hidden – by our sins, by suffering by evil. But the glory of coming is there – if we look for it. He comes in the name of the love of the Father. He comes in the power of the Holy Spirit. He comes in the proclamation and preaching of the Word of God. He comes in the witness of those who love him. He comes in the distressing disguise of the poor, the suffering, the forgotten. He comes in the Holy Eucharist. Each new presence He brings only anticipates His Final Coming. And in the procession, we remember this coming and we hope for it and we cry “maranatha, come Lord Jesus!”

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Beauty Ever Ancient Ever New

In my last post, I promised to speak more about the Divine Economy. The Divine Economy concerns all of God’s dealing with creation. It is distinguished from the inner-life of God, a reality inaccessible to us but revealed through the Divine Economy.

Knowing the divine economy is the only way we have insight into the communion of love which is the inner life of the Trinity. Another way of saying this is we can only know God through the humanity of Christ. Christ alone, the Image of the Invisible God, can reveal God. The Divine Economy is most fully realized in the humanity of the Lord Jesus.

The Divine Economy reveals the Trinity — but the Trinity is so much more. Those who say “yes” to the Gift of God offered in this economy of salvation find themselves drawn to this mystery, caught up into it. Anyone who does not see this will never understand why the ancient Christians so fiercely debated the dogmas about Christ and the Trinity. They were trying to protect and hand on the mystery they had received, that they knew in their hearts. The ancient Christians, and Christians of the East to this day, consider contemplation of the inner-life of God “theology”. This sort of theology (mystical theology or experiential theology) is completely different from what is deemed academic theology today. It is more a matter of the very core of one’s person – a prayer of the heart – offered in the deepest sanctuary of man. Those who want to experience the Holy Trinity are exhorted by the great saints to enter into the silence of prayer and search for the Lord in the depths of one own self. The reason this kind of theology is possible in this way is because the Trinity dwells in this deepest center of who we are. The Trinity is present: more fully present to us than we are to ourselves. This mystery is what Jesus establishes and reveals to us through the Gift of the Holy Spirit – the Gift that moves the Divine Economy from something we speak about to a reality we live.

In fact, the English word “economy” comes from a Greek term meaning “the management of one’s household.” God the Father manages his household in such a way that our hearts find their home in Him and He in us. Along these lines, Elisabeth of the Trinity, a 19th Century Carmelite who loved to spend time searching for the Lord in her heart, asserted that our true home is in the bosom of the Trinity. She explained to her married sister that we are not present to God as slaves but as sons – participants in the eternal Sonship of Christ Jesus. The human heart is where God makes his home and His Heart is the only place where the our hearts can be at home.
The divine economy has two dimensions: the visible and socially historic, and the invisible and personally spiritual. By this I mean that God has created a visible and invisible cosmos – things that are seen and others that are not. His economy extends to both these realms. In the visible universe we see the work of creation and all of salvation history. The prophets, the priests and kings were all the instruments of his great faithfulness to us. The promises they revealed were fulfilled in the most wonderful and unimaginable way when the Father sent his only begotten Son. Jesus, the visible image of the invisible God, the Word made Flesh, the author and perfector of our faith: through his life, death and resurrection He perfectly revealed the eternal plan of the Father. A fully historical, completely concrete, scandalously particular man, He was rejected and put to death because the Holy Spirit revealed through Christ’s miracles and teachings that Jesus himself was God. By his ascension into heaven and the sending of the Holy Spirit into the Church, those who have faith in Jesus and are baptized become actual members of his glorified Body – revelators of the love of the Father to the world.

In all these visible works, the Lord has manifested himself and become present to us in ever new and more surprising ways. You might say He is a wild and untamed God: no system can contain Him or anticipate the splendors of His love He continues to manifest through his saints. This should be developed so much more – but I simply list it now to give a small taste of what God has made visibly manifest.

Just a note about the incomprehensible transcendent love of God: Some think they have figured God out with their own limited rationality. C.S. Lewis struggled with a form of this on his path to Christianity. The religions of the East seem to answer the deficiencies of the moralizing God taught to him in his youth. But even in his conflicting attractions to atheism and pantheism, it was as if he wanted to define what God can and cannot do – what He can and cannot be. What he discovered was that the only god limited rationality can arrive at is a static, stale and dry passionless idea. It was compelling for him that everything was absorbed in this one thing. But in this effort, as intellectually satisfying as it was, something did not fully resonate. In the back of his mind there was a huanting suscipicion that there might be something more.

In fact, to see God as a thing, even an absorbing thing, to believe that all things are this one thing is to lose the point altogether. God is not a thing among other things nor even the only thing. Whatever we think we mean by thing – God is totally other: incomprehensible in his power, his knowledge, his essence. But to those who receive the Holy Spirit, the splendor of his glory is manifest to their faith – his ineffable love and inscrutable plan is revealed in their hearts.

Thankfully, God does not limit his being or activity to some idealized spectrum of human ideas. This was one of the things that C.S. Lewis would have discovered when he read G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. While for now I do not have time to compare Lewis’s Surprised by Joy with Chesterton’s Orthodoxy – they make a great comparison. For our purposes, it will have to suffice to say that God is physical, concrete, particular, historical in his great love for us because He loves all that He has made, especially the irreplaceable uniqueness of each person He has willed into being. He yearns with a friendship love for us and this yearning has moved him to become like us in all things but sin – and this has opened up for us the possibility of being like Him in all things when we renounce sin and cling to him.

In this is fulfilled Jesus Christ’s great desire, the prayer He prayed the night before He died: that we might be one in Him as He is in the Father. This is the communion He thirsts for with each of us and all of us together. The human person was created in the very image and likeness of God because the ultimate end of all of this is the perfect unity of creatures with the Holy Trinity. (See the Catechism of the Catholic Church, #260.)

Yet he not only works in the concrete particularity that characterizes our day to day existence in the real world. He also works invisibly. St. Thomas Aquinas speaks of the spiritual missions of the Son and the Spirit.

Here we come to the main theme: God is Beauty ever ancient and ever new. He is before all that is – the 3,000 to 5,000 year old Bristlecone symbolizes this. Biblically, we were scarcely out of the Garden when this tree is thought to have sprouted on the earth – yet after all these millennia its fir is soft and full of life. And unlike a Pullman novel or the picture of the dead Bristlecone at the top of this article: He is never old, never exhausted, never spent. Christian life coming from God is similar: this life is more ancient than creation itself because it is the very life of God. And, at the same time, it is ever fresh, new and childlike. Inexhaustible and unimaginable – it is the Lord’s greatest surprise. Christianity is not a religion of old gurus on mountains who have grown cynical toward life– it is the faith of the children of God who have only now begun to live.

In our next post we will consider the progression or new creation that God’s new life ignites in us. We will see that He constantly gives himself to us in new ways to deepen our friendship and to equip us with everything we need for the great work with which He desires to entrust us. (Photos by Fr. John Gracey, Pastor of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Bishop, CA)

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Trinity Sunday

At the heart of all true Christian spirituality is the great mystery of the Holy Trinity. This mystery revealed by Jesus is communicated directly into the depths of our hearts by faith in Him. Some people see the mystery as a puzzle to be solved and yet never solvable. Others try to describe the reality of Three Divine Persons in One God as a triangle or shamrock or some other metaphor. While some of these insights on occasion shed some light and answer some questions, very few of them actually lead to a deeper contemplation of the mystery. For those not content to approach God as a mere intellectual exercise, there are the great saints and mystics who have attempted to describe an experience of the Triune Godhead as something much more than a head-trip. This has been true since the very beginnings of our faith.

The Gospels profess the one God while at the same time they witness to the Father’s love of his “beloved Son,” Jesus’ love of his Heavenly Father and the Holy Spirit who is also the “promise of the Father”. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit live in perfect possession of one another – each enveloped and enveloping the other Divine Persons in eternal being, inexhaustible knowing, and infinite love. In fact, it is their mutual relations in their divine life, light and love that distinguish each Divine Person. Thus, it is of apostolic tradition, in our earliest creeds, that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are to be worshipped as one God. The Fathers of the Church called this one God ‘the Three’ at least as early as 180 A.D. (See http://tinyurl.com/23tfmq.) A 19th Century mystic recovers this original usage for the Western Church when she refers to the Trinity as “my Three, my All, my beatitude, infinite solitude, immensity in which I loose myself.”

We do not appreciate the gravity of such assertions, how absolutely surprising this revelation is. The idea of a passionate God who lives in an eternal movement of love is not what cold reason or cynical experience prepares one for. The wisdom of this age always aspires to a changeless, disinterested Absolute without passion. The pure, the altruistic, the ideal must be objective – never personal. But the Christian God was never experienced as a static heartless reality by the mystics. Pseudo-Dionysius even speaks of “Divine Eros.”

In his usage, eros is a love that yearns for union. Love in this sense involves intense passion, yearning desire, and unquenchable movement. It is like a raging fire. Changing things were considered less real than the unchanging eternal truths. But through their faith, they experienced an eternal Furnace of burning Love at the source of all that is – at once, ever ancient and ever new. They no longer believed in the distant, disinterested, dispassionate Divine Being of the philosophers – They clung the dynamic, jealous, Lover of the Hebrews – the Bridegroom of the Bride.

The Gift of the Holy Spirit, the freely given personal presence of God dwelling in them as in a Temple, communicated this divine passion to them. Because the Spirit is inseparable from the Son, every time they received this gift, they knew and enjoyed the presence of the Risen Lord in ever new ways. They asserted that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit share in an unchangeable movement of Love, an ineffable life of communion in one undivided Nature not merely because they were told that this was so, but because only assertions like this could explain what was unfolding in their own heart. God, One in Three and Three in One, was for them not a confounding puzzle, but a heart rending mystery. St. Gregory of Nanzianzus relates, “I have not even begun to think of unity when the Trinity bathes me in its splendor. I have not even begun to think of the Trinity when unity grasps me.”

Up until now, we have only considered the inner life of the Trinity as it is experienced through the divine indwelling. The presence of God is dynamic. It evokes a response of the heart. We can ignore this dynamism – but only by becoming hard hearted. But to live by love, accepting the enveloping call of this mystery of love is required. The unity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, the loving dynamism of their living communion, calls on the very depths of our existence. It is to this love our life is directed. It is through being enveloped in this mystery that we discover the truth of who we really are. But we do not share in the inner life of God by nature – we participate in his life by grace. It is to the Gift of the Holy Spirit and the gifts of the divine economy that we will turn to in our next post – because only through these gifts that we can glimpse God’s ultimate purpose, his dream for us to live in the bosom of the Holy Trinity.

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