We bear traces of God’s Trinitarian being

Trinity Sunday, Year B 
First Reading: Dt 4:32-34, 39-40 
Second Reading: Rom 8:14-17 
Gospel Reading: Mt 28:16-20

This Sunday we celebrate the fact that the one God is a Trinity of Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is “the most fundamental and essential” of all “the truths of faith,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

It is so fundamental that to be re-born with supernatural life, we must be baptized “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” It is so essential that we address God “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

It is said that St. Augustine, walking along the seashore meditating on the Holy Trinity, was told by a child that it would be easier to pour the ocean into a hole in the sand than to understand God’s nature.

This story (represented in art but not found in the saint’s writings) seems to forbid us to think about the Holy Trinity. Yet God revealed his Trinitarian nature, the Catechism says, so that we could enter into “real intimacy” with him.

Let us think about it, then.

“God is love,” St. John says. Now love is given by one person and received by another. If God were a single person, “God is love” would be meaningless.

In fact, God has left “traces of his Trinitarian being” throughout creation, the Catechism says. “The image of the Trinity was made in man,” said St. Augustine, that “man should be the image of the one true God.”

“In the beginning God created,” Dorothy Sayers says in her book The Mind of the Maker. “He made this and he made that and he saw that it was good.” Then he created humans “in his own image.”

At this point, she notes, all we have been told about God is that he creates. Apparently, humans image God by creating.

“Every work of creation is threefold,” she says in her play The Zeal of thy House: “an earthly trinity to match the heavenly.” There is “the creative idea,” “the whole work complete at once;” and this is the image of the Father. There is “the creative energy or activity,” which is “begotten of that idea, working in time from the beginning to the end;” and this is the image of the Son. And there is “the creative power,” the response to “the meaning of the work” in those who receive it; and this is the image of Spirit.

Yet “these three are one,” Sayers says, “each equally in itself the whole work;” and “this is the image of the Trinity.”

In her book, Sayers describes the three aspects of literary creation: the book as conceived, the book as written, and the book as read.

Instead, let us consider the creation of a dinner, which may be more familiar. Putting on a dinner takes time, but the hostess is always conscious that the idea of the dinner – date, menu, guests, etc. – already exists, a complete whole. “Now I just have to do it,” she might say. (Analogically, God the Father exists from all eternity.)

Throughout the shopping, cooking, setting the table, etc., the dinner as prepared must conform to the dinner as conceived, or it will be a failure. (Analogically, Christ, God the Son made Man, said that he did only what he had seen his Father do.)

And, of course, the guests must come and enjoy the dinner, and that cannot happen until the preparation is complete. (Analogically, Christ said that unless he left, the Holy Spirit would not come.)

Nevertheless, there are not three dinners, but one.

Let us pray, in the words of the Mass: “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.”