15 June 2014
The Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity
The story is told that the great Cardinal Dulles entering a church saw a large banner proclaiming: “God is other people.” The cardinal remarked he was tempted to take a magic marker and note: “God is other, people.”
The world has never been more worldly, and along with it, we have never been more prisoners of the whirl of this world. In earlier times, at least, people could marvel at the galaxies and imagine souls flying to the Milky Way. Few even get to see any stars let alone galaxies any more! We are trapped in the neon lights, and the endless chatter of electronic boxes. But our souls are made for someone radically other than all of His Creation – and we are called to a dignity far greater than any part and indeed all of the billions of stars. We are called to an eternity in the love of God, who is other than His Creation.
And this God, other than His Creation – no closer nor further from it no matter how many billions of light years we travel out, or micro-worlds we plummet in tininess – has revealed Himself not just as “love,” some abstraction, but as a community of persons in perfect unity. Father, Son and Holy Spirit. When we are told we are made in the “image and likeness of God” perhaps one way to view that is to see that we are made in and for communion of persons, for none of us drops from the sky alone, we swim in the same ocean of language, we are made for communion. Hell is total isolation.
Communion with other people, yes. But that is only possible because the perfect communion of God has reached down into our hearts, into our midst, and has shown us the way to the Father, in union with the Son, Crucified and Risen for us, and we, lifted from the misery of sin and blindness by their Holy Spirit. Yes, God is other, people: and yes, that other God has come into the midst of our mess to lift us into the circulation of love which is the Holy Trinity. Let us rejoice to be initiated into this most marvelous of mysteries!