Unity with the Trinity and the Cross of Christ

God has called us to participate by grace in his divine life of love. We know this and can experience by faith the communion of love that is God. Each Divine Person perfectly possesses the other divine persons as gift and at the same time perfectly gives the gift of his divine self to be possessed by the others. Such a circumcession of love is at once, in the words of St. Augustine, ever ancient and ever new: Father, Son and Holy Spirit are Giver and Gift to one another according to the inexhaustible freedom of their distinct relations in the One Divine Nature. Similarly as creatures, God wants us to know his love forever and to be loved by us.

To achieve this, He does not wish to absorb us into his being so that our own humanity is annihilated. He loves our humanity and out of love He created it. Rather, He wants us to thrive - and He knows because of the way we were created, we can only thrive in his particular love for the unique humanity each of us enjoys. He wants to destroy everything that compromises the integrity of our humanity and at the same time, He yearns to give all that is good, holy and true in humanity an eternal quality so that it will never again be subject to death or corruption. He wants us to thrive forever with Him.

He is able to do this because of who He is and how He made us. It is out of the inner-life of Divine Love that all creation flows and that creation is restored to its original purpose. Originally, God created the cosmos and the human person to enter into a perfect Communion of Love with Him and in doing so to reveal the glory of the Trinity. Christ Jesus entered into our history to restore this original purpose when we under the influence of evil rejected God. Embracing this rejection, Jesus offered us a second chance by re-establishing access to the Father through his death and resurrection. Thus, when we turn to Jesus in faith, the loving plan of God begins to be realized in us. St. Paul in Ephesians identifies this as our predestination in Christ to be "the praise of God's glorious grace."