7 June 2020
The Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity
Few things are as practical as the Trinity. When Paul concludes his second letter to the Corinthians, he wishes them to have “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.” Grace, love, and fellowship—three things we cannot truly live without. Grace is a concrete experience of God’s love. We humans cannot just be told of something, we must experience it. Who better to offer us grace, a concrete experience, than Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh? So an experience of love leads us to love itself.
Grace leads us to love just as the Son leads us to the Father. The Father is the One from whom the Son and Spirit proceed. St. Augustine says that the Father “is the principle of the whole deity.” The reality of love is a uniting force. What better way to be united with others than to know the Father, the principle of the Trinity and “creator of heaven and earth”? The more the Son shows us of the Father, the more we begin to recognize our kinship with other creatures, with one another, and even the family resemblance between ourselves and God. The experience of grace shows us the reality of love, and we are drawn ever closer.
We cannot experience the love of God and not the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Like the Trinity, they are both distinct and inseparable. In love, we give ourselves to another. The loving gift between the Father and the Son is so perfect that it, too, is fully God. The Holy Spirit is the fellowship between the Father and the Son, and now gives fellowship to us, too. What would our lives be without fellowship? The Holy Spirit gives us fellowship because we need it for our very existence. We need fellowship, and so we need love, and so we need grace. We need the Trinity.