Guided by the Holy Spirit into the Truth of Trinitarian Life, Holy Trinity Sunday (C), June 12, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Chapel of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, Year C
June 12, 2022
Prov 8:22-31, Ps 8, Rom 5:1-5, Jn 16:12-15

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided today’s homily: 

• Today we celebrate the feast of who God is. Every Sunday is, in a very real sense, dedicated to God and therefore every Sunday really is Trinity Sunday. But since the 1300s, the Church has celebrated on the Sunday immediately following Pentecost a feast dedicated to the Holy Trinity, to help all of us focus more explicitly on who God is in his profound mysterious depths, and therefore on who we’re called to be made in His image and likeness. In an age when many forget about God, when aggressive secularists are trying to drive even conversation about God from public spaces, it is important for believers to be humbly bold not just in reminding society that God exists as the Creator of all, not just in revealing him and his name and nature, but setting an example of how to worship and thank him.
• In today’s Gospel, Jesus says to us, “I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now. But when he comes, the Spirit of Truth, he will guide you to all truth.” Jesus goes on to say that just as he has given us what he has received from the Father, so the Holy Spirit will give us what he has received from Jesus. Each of the Persons of the Blessed Trinity exists in an eternal communion of giving and receiving, of loving and being loved, and toward us, they seek to bring us into that dynamic. The Father sends the Son who reveals the Father. The Father and the Son send the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit helps us to relate to the Father and remember the Son, guiding us not only to truths like the wisdom of creation announced to us in the first reading from the Book of Proverbs and Psalm 8, but into the most important truth of all, the very truth of who God is.
• “The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity,” we read in a very important paragraph in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “is the central mystery of Christian faith and life” (CCC 234).  It’s the central mystery, note, not just with regard to what we believe but how we live. The Catechism goes on to say why: “It is the mystery of God in himself. It is therefore the source of all the other mysteries of faith, the light that enlightens them. It is the most fundamental and essential teaching in the ‘hierarchy of the truths of faith.’” The mystery of the Trinity enlightens the mystery of creation, the mystery of redemption, the mystery of Sanctification. It illumines every page of Sacred Scripture. It helps us to understand the commandments. It sheds light on the four last things. It reveals what is at the root of all of the sacraments and prayer.
• The Catechism paragraph concludes, “The whole history of salvation is identical with the history of the way and the means by which the one true God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, reveals himself to men ‘and reconciles and unites with himself those who turn away from sin.” Underneath the history of the world, underneath our own personal history from the moment of our conception in our mother’s womb until now and beyond, everything has developed within this mystery of the Blessed Trinity. Therefore, it’s crucial for us as human beings, not to mention believers, to pour ourselves — mind, heart, soul and strength — into the mystery of the Trinity. The teaching on the Trinity is not meant be some footnote on a Christian life, but a central part. The Christian life is meant to be a Trinitarian life. Your life, my life, is meant to be a Trinitarian life.
• And so the question we must ponder today is: How do we live a Trinitarian life?
• We certainly are helped to live this reality liturgically, although sometimes we can fail to recognize it. This whole Mass, for example, is lived in communion with the Trinity. We began Mass in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. At the end of it we will receive the blessing of Father, Son and Holy Spirit and the commission, “Ite, missa est,” an abbreviation of Christ’s valedictory command in St. Matthew’s Gospel, “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to observe everything” that Jesus has commanded us. Everything we do and say during the Mass is nothing other than a dialogue between us and the Father, through the person of Jesus Christ, in the light and with the help of the Holy Spirit. In the middle of Mass, we loudly proclaim that we have grounded our lives in the mystery of the Trinity, as we proclaim together with the Church on earth, in heaven and in Purgatory: “I believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth… I believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God… I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified.” At the end of the Eucharistic Prayer, as we lift up Christ’s Body and Blood to the Father and offer ourselves together with him, the priest on behalf of Christ’s whole mystical body summarizes the fundamental orientation of a Christian life: “Through [Christ], with Him and in Him, O God, Almighty Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all glory and honor is yours, forever and ever.”
• Just like the Mass, our whole life is meant to begin and end in the name of the Blessed Trinity and be a profession of the faith we proclaim together. Our spiritual life begins when a minister of God makes us God’s child and a temple of His presence by baptizing us, “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” To be baptized is to be submerged, to enter into, to be inundated in the “name” not “names” of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It is to enter into his life. The awesome gift and mystery of the Trinitarian indwelling begins then. At the end of our life, a priest, in the prayers after the anointing, says, “Go forth, Christian soul, in the name of God the almighty Father who created you, in the name of Jesus Christ, Son of the living God who suffered for you, in the name of the Holy Spirit, who was poured out upon you. Go forth, faithful Christian.” Between these two extremes — birth and death — our whole earthly existence is meant to be lived explicitly within the life of the Blessed Trinity: in the name of the Trinity spouses are united in holy matrimony; in the name of the Trinity, priests and deacons are ordained and consecrated for God’s service; in the name of the Trinity, our sins are forgiven. Our whole Christian existence develops in the company of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit: the three Persons are with us, they walk each step of life with us — and when we’re in the state of grace, they do so on the inside! God makes us his dwelling place on earth. He wants to abide in us and have us abide in him. Few of us, however, recognize this accompaniment. We are like the disciples on the road to Emmaus who, even though they walked several miles with Jesus, never recognized him until the end.
• In order to recognize God dwelling with and within us, two things must grow. First, our prayer must grow. St. John Paul II wrote in his 2001 pastoral plan for the third Christian millennium (Novo Millennio Ineunte), “Learning [the] Trinitarian shape of Christian prayer and living it fully, above all in the liturgy … but also in personal experience, is the secret of a truly vital Christianity.” For our life as Christians to come fully alive, we must learn how to pray in the Trinity, how to pray to the Father through, with and in Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit. Prayer is possible because, as the future Pope Benedict once wrote, God is the eternal logos or conversation. Prayer is ultimately not an exchange of ideas or words but of persons and the Blessed Trinity is a tripersonal dialogue. When the Son of God took on our human nature, humanity was mysteriously taken up into that conversation. The work of the Holy Spirit in baptism, in the Sacraments and beyond brings you and me personally into that conversation, and the Holy Spirit does that work in Christ’s Mystical Body, the Church. The upshot of that Trinitarian work is that by the Holy Spirit we can cry out, as St. Paul reminds us in his Letter to the Romans, “Abba, Father,” with the confidence of much beloved sons and daughters.
• But prayer must never be separated from life. As the Catechism says, we’re called to live as we pray, to put into practice what Triune God has come to reveal to us and make possible. We must live the “Trinitarian shape of Christian prayer … in personal experience.” And so this Trinitarian Life that is nourished by the Sacraments and experienced in personal prayer is meant to overflow into our entire existence, which is meant to be an existence-made-prayer, or a life-made-Trinitarian. Jesus has come to reveal to us who God is so that not only we may come to know him and experience his life and love throughout our daily existence into eternity but so that we can also grow to know and become fully ourselves, who have been created by Him in his image and likeness.
• What is the Trinitarian shape of Christian life? It’s first a life of communion. That’s why Jesus prayed so hard on Holy Thursday that his disciples might be one, as he and the Father are one in the Holy Spirit. To live according to our having been made in the image of the Trinity is to live for communion, with God and with others. We know that there are many who are sowers of division, who always contrast themselves to others they criticize, who label and put people into different camps, even in the Church. We Christians, to live according to our Trinitarian image, must live differently. As individuals and together, we must become signs of communion and instruments of unity. If people want to see the loving union that exists in God, they should be able to glimpse it in the way any two Christians love each other, any two members of a Catholic family, any two MCs in a Convent, any two parishioners in a Catholic parish, any two students at a Catholic School or religious education program. This is obviously a tall order and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise; but we also shouldn’t pretend this is some type of unreachable standard that we’re excused even to try to obtain. To seek this type of communion with others doesn’t mean to sacrifice the truth for the sake of a lowest common-denominator “Can’t we all just get along?,” live and let live, kind of lifestyle. But it does mean making the choice to choose to find the good more than the bad, to praise more than criticize, to turn toward rather than turn away, to pray for others more than judge or spurn, to forgive more than to hold grudges. This is so important to Jesus that he once said that he if we come to the altar but recognize our brother has something against us, to go first to be reconciled with our brother before offering our gift. Jesus came to reconcile all things in himself and if we are truly his followers, we will do everything we can to try to bring about communion. And the Holy Spirit’s principal work is to make this communion with God and others possible, if we cooperate. He is the eternal existential unity between the Father and the Son and his principal work is to help the Church, and each of us, become the image and likeness of that Trinitarian communion. That’s what we pray for at the beginning of the Mass when we wish each other the “communion of the Holy Spirit.”
• The second way our Christian life takes on a Trinitarian shape is by loving as God loves. As St. John wrote in his first letter, “God is love” (1 John 4:16). This statement strongly implies that the one God somehow had to be a Trinity of Persons. For God to be love, he could not have been solitary, because no one can love in a vacuum. In love, there is always one who loves, one who is loved, and the content of their love for each other. God the Father and God the Son, in all eternity, loved each other so much that their love generated (or “spirated”) a third person, the Holy Spirit (“Sacred Breath”). The Persons of the Trinity exist in an eternal communion of persons in love, in which the three persons exist in one mutual, united, interpersonal self-giving. We, having been made in God’s image and likeness, are created in love and for love. We’re called to live in a communion of persons in love. And this is what God himself seeks to make possible through giving Himself to us. St. Paul tells us in today’s second reading, “The love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” God gives us his love so that we can love others in God. Each of us, on this Trinity Sunday, is summoned to ask whether we really strive to live as a loving communion of persons in God’s image and likeness, or whether we live selfishly, egocentrically and individualistically. Missionaries of Charity are called in a special way to communicate the witness and reality of this divine love poured into human hearts. The spirit of the Society of the MCs, as she said, features a loving trust flowing from being loved, a total surrender as a response of love, and a cheerfulness as a fruit of love received and given. The spirit of the Society is formed by and modeled after the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the Father and the Son, whose love and presence she received as a gift and wholeheartedly sought to share as a gift. Missionaries of Charity are called to teach everyone to trust lovingly in the Father as Jesus and Mary did, conscious as Jesus said that God the Father loves us more than lilies and sparrows and will never give us a stone when we ask for bread. Missionaries of Charity are summoned to exemplify the total surrender to the Father and his adorable will that we see in Jesus and, helped by the Holy Spirit, in Mary. Missionaries of Charity are supposed to radiate the cheerfulness that is a fruit of the Holy Spirit’s presence in a soul into which God’s love has been outpoured and from which that love overflows. The Solemnity of the Holy Trinity, therefore, is an opportunity to recommit to the Trinitarian foundation of the spirit of the Society.
• Today is a chance for us, once again, to hear God calling us and helping us to live up to our dignity as Christians, to become one just as Father, Son and Holy Spirit are one, and enter more deeply into the joy-filled communion with Him and with others. At the beginning of Mass, we implored this gift for each other. I prayed for you with St. Paul’s words,“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you,” and Mass is the occasion for us to recognize how blessed we are that our Triune God has chosen us to receive these three interrelated gifts and then to commit to dwell in created participation in divine life, love and unity and let them overflow. Today, as the Holy Spirit guides us into the central mystery of Christian faith and life, the most fundamental and essential teaching in all the truths of the faith, who God is in himself, we ask for his help to believe more profoundly in this mystery, to profess it with greater conviction, to celebrate it with greater joy and to live it in deeper communion. With gratitude we him to let our prayer and our life take on ever more a Trinitarian dimension, so that through our communion and our love, we may ever proclaim, by words and deeds, in this world and forever, “Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end!” Amen!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download