…teach all nations, baptizing them in
the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Trinity Sunday
3 June 2012
We are accustomed, I
think, to regard every Mass and every liturgical celebration as being directed to
God the Father through Christ in the unity of the Holy Spirit. After all, the Roman Canon begins with, Te igitur, clementissime Pater, per Dominum
nostrum Jesum Christum, and many collects are directed to God the Father,
through Jesus Christ, in the unity of the Holy Spirit. And
yet, these three divine Persons are not three gods, but the one and only God. Nor is any divine Person subordinate to any
other. On the contrary, all are
inseparable in being, all equal in dignity.
Thus, even though the way we speak appears to separate the Persons of
the Trinity from each other and subordinate one to another, the threefold Unity
in Trinity which is God forces us to acknowledge with Dom Guéranger, that
[e]very homage paid
to God by the Church’s liturgy has the holy Trinity as its object. Time, as well as eternity, belongs to the
Trinity. The Trinity is the scope of all
religion. Every day, every hour, belongs
to It. The feasts instituted in memory
of the mysteries of our redemption center in It. The feast of the blessed Virgin and the
saints are but so many means for leading us to the praise of the God who is One
in essence, and Three in Persons.[1]
Accordingly, to keep the
limitations of human language from producing in the minds of the faithful a
false or heretical understanding of the Godhead, the Usus antiquior of the Roman rite wisely gives expression in various
ways to the truth that all worship is directed to the Triune God, the Blessed
Trinity. In keeping with today’s feast,
allow me to give you not one, but three examples of this. As you may recall, during the Offertory,
after praying to each of the three divine Persons, the celebrant then beseeches
the Holy Trinity to accept the oblation being offered to It in memory of the
Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension of Our Lord Jesus Christ. And towards the end of the Mass, just before
imparting the final blessing, the celebrant again prays to the Blessed Trinity,
asking that the devotion and docility of his service may be pleasing to It, that
the Sacrifice of the Mass which he has offered may be found acceptable, and
that it may obtain forgiveness for him and for those for whom he has offered
it. And then there is today’s preface. Not surprisingly it directs us to the mystery of the Holy Trinity,
succinctly encapsulating the perennial teaching of the Church; namely, that God
is One, not in the singularity of one Person, but in the Trinity of one
Substance. All three divine Persons are
equally God without difference or discrimination, such that in confessing the
true and everlasting Godhead, we adore distinction in Persons, unity in
Essence, and equality in majesty. In the
Usus antiquior, this pithy
instruction on the Trinity is presented to us not just on Trinity Sunday, but on
most of the Sundays after Pentecost — the liturgical time that corresponds
perfectly with the historical present, when the Church continues to carry out
the mission which Christ entrusted to her in the power of the Holy Ghost,
whereby the Father draws all those who believe to Himself. In doing so, we are reminded of the ultimate
reason why we should be interested in loving Christ and keeping His
commandments, especially the one that bids us to love one another.
It so happens that the Ordinary Form, for reasons known
only to liturgists, lacks the abovementioned prayers, restricts the use of the
preface of the Holy Trinity to today’s feast, and omits the doxologies found in
the Usus antiquior. As a result, I would not be surprised if many
Catholics these days labor under the false impression that some sort of inequality
or subordination exists among the Divine Persons. Be that as it may, the Ordinary Form would
doubtless be greatly enriched if
those prayers which, so to speak, keep the Trinity of Persons together were
incorporated into it, and if the Preface of the Holy Trinity were used for the
Sundays after Pentecost. But I digress…
Since every Mass is directed to the Holy Trinity, it
took a while for the idea of a special feast in honor of the Blessed Trinity to
catch on. In the eighth century, the
monk Alcuin composed a votive Mass in honor of the Trinity. However, the man who did the most to promote
today’s feast was St. Thomas à Becket.
On this very day in 1162, which was also the First Sunday after
Pentecost, Thomas was consecrated archbishop of Canterbury. Soon afterwards, he decreed that, in memory
of his consecration, a feast in honor of the Trinity be celebrated on this
Sunday throughout the land. Some two
centuries later, in 1347, Pope John XXII extended this feast to the entire
Western Church. Following the lead of
the martyred archbishop of Canterbury, he too placed it on the first Sunday
after Pentecost. That such a feast be
celebrated right after Pentecost is far from arbitrary. For Pentecost Sunday commemorates the descent
of the Holy Ghost on the Apostles, which was necessary if they were to carry
out their mission to spread the Good News, of teaching all nations, and baptizing
men in the Name of the holy Trinity.
As much as could be
said about how there arises in the Godhead this distinction in Persons, it can
be reduced to God’s eternal act of knowing and loving Himself. In knowing and understanding His own divine
essence, God generates a perfect Image, a perfect Word or Idea of Himself
within Himself. This perfect mirror
Image or Idea of God is so perfect as to be God Himself. This intellectual generation is implied in
the opening words of the Gospel according to St. John, which we hear at the end
of every Mass: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and
the Word was God.” Similarly, when God loves
Himself, there proceeds from Him what Scriptures call the Holy Spirit. Just as God’s understanding of Himself
generates within Himself a divine Idea or Word of Himself, so too, in loving
Himself, there arises in God the presence of Himself as the Object of His love,
which Presence, as an impetuous Force, as an irresistible Sigh, as subsisting
Divine Love, drives Him towards His own infinite loveliness.
Now, perhaps some of you
are asking yourselves, does this mystery of our faith really matter? What
difference does it (or should it)
make in my life that there are three divine Persons subsisting in the undivided
unity of the Trinity? All one has to do
to answer that question is to look at how other people have interacted with
their various gods. Among the ancient
pagans, the endless myths about the gods reflected and justified the sin and
violence found on earth. The best you
could hope for is to become another god, a practitioner of sacred sin and
violence. That’s a lot different from
the idea that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that
whosoever should believe in Him may not perish but may have everlasting life”;[2] or
that the Son of God became man to die for our sins and show us what divine love
looked like; or that the Son of God was born of a woman so that we could be born
of the Holy Ghost and drawn to the Father so as to be immersed in that inner
life of Being Itself! If this is our
destiny — indeed, if we are made partakers of the divine nature here and now — how
foolish the man who goes through life observing only the outward forms of the
true religion, with no desire to be united to and immersed in the Object of
these outward forms; with no desire himself to know and love God with his whole heart, and with his whole soul, and
with his whole mind, and with his whole strength, and his neighbor as someone called
to the same eternal destiny as himself!
That’s right: if God did not so love us as to desire to share His life
with us, it would be pointless to act with the supernatural motive of charity, seeking
first the kingdom of heaven, asking God to forgive us our own sins, according
to the measure that we forgive those who sin against us. The more we think we can afford to treat God
with indifference, the less we have a reason to complain when we discover ourselves
living in a Hobbesian world, where every man is in a constant state of war with
every other man, and where the life of every man is “solitary, poor, nasty,
brutish, and short”.[3]
In
sum, then, let us always believe in the divine Trinity and the threefold Unity,
taking care that no one seduces us from the faith and truth of the Catholic
Church, that we may be able to lay hold of the forgiveness of sins and the
resurrection of the flesh and life everlasting through
the one, true, and holy Catholic Church, in which we learn of the Father and
the Son and the Holy Spirit, one God, to whom is honor and glory forever and
ever.
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