Hidden Immensity and Secret Harmonies

A hidden Immensity of meaning, a fullness that has only begun to disclose itself, awaits us in the humble act of prayer. This is the Word of the Father. He makes known the truth in ways hidden behind what seems to be routine. This Great Stillness is disguised in the demanding circumstances of the moment. This Beatitude is the hidden solitude one can find even on a busy street. He speaks in the language of silences, most still to be heard, that haunts the noise of the work-a-day world. This Divine Glance is disguised in the lonely stare of a heart that thinks itself forsaken.

Nothing deserves our attention in the way that Divine presence ought to command ours. Fires may rage dangerously close. Floods might threaten. Gratuitous sudden violence leave its trail of broken lives and hearts. Family anxieties and difficult relationships might pile up in overwhelming ways. Menacing political and cultural forces might intimidate. Before our very eyes, the innocent, the marginalized and the weak may be grievously neglected, or harshly crushed, or used. All of this might rightfully require our attention for a time, and often demand decisive action. With time, all of this passes, but God does not change and the love He yearns for us to know is never offered the same way twice. 

For the Holy Trinity envelops and penetrates this whole brief moment of life we share together. So fragile and magnificent, such sorrow and joy all at once, this passing moment rushes to the Heart of the Lord - if we will let it take us there. This very moment was loved into existence - the idea of it so beautiful to God that He willed it should exist. We are bogged down in sluggishness and still something in it echoes and draws us. 

Let the secret harmonies of God draw us out of ourselves.  In ways that defy our ability to guess, the Three Divine Persons have already disclosed their Unity to us, and in this Unity, their Three-ness rings out more beautifully than any earthly music. The great symphony of this uncreated Love resounds at this very moment - and only prayer opens the ears of the heart to hear it.

In Praise of the Holy Trinity

In a retreat reflection that she wrote for her sister Marguerite, a mom with small children, Saint Elizabeth of the Trinity sets the life of heaven as the ideal to seek. Yet, she does not propose heaven as simply a remote future possibility. Through a complete surrender of our whole existence to God, the life of heaven is a way of life that begins now. This means that the glory that awaits us is the same glory already present to us now. We are meant to be the praise of this glory - creatures who make known the inexhaustible riches of God:

In Heaven, each soul is a praise of glory to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. This is because each soul is fixed in pure love. Each one "no longer lives its own life but the life of God" (St. John of the Cross).  The soul "knows itself", says Saint Paul, "as it is known by God." Its will the will of God. Its love the very love of God.  

In reality, the Spirit of love and power transforms the soul.  Given in order to supply what is lacking, as Saint Paul explains, the Holy Spirit accomplishes this glorious transformation in it (see Romans 8:26).  Saint John of the Cross affirms that for the soul that has surrendered to God, little is left to; by the power of the Holy Spirit, it attains the degree of which we are speaking here below! This is what I call a perfect praise of glory!

Heaven in Faith, 42.

The Indwelling of the Trinity

What animates Christian Contemplation is the most beautiful and intimate mystery of the universe -- the Glory out of which all things visible and invisible have issued forth.  This unseen Glory causes all that is to exist and holds all things in existence for no other reason than sheer love and goodness. By an utterly excessive outpouring of love, in a divine and wholly gratuitous gift of sheer grace, this inexhaustible treasure has been entrusted to the heart to be known and loved.

Such is the Divine Indwelling - beyond holding us into existence, the Trinity manifests its goodness and truth to those who believe in the Risen Lord. This is no ordinary knowledge, no simple accumulation or mastery of information. It is sacred truth - the kind of truth that when humbly received shatters all rash judgments and helps us find the way home.

The prayer that receives this knowledge and love is called mystical. It is produced, not by human effort, but by the gentle touch of the Holy Spirit.Only the most humble act of faith and determined devotion makes the soul vulnerable enough to receive this Divine Gift.

The Holy Trinity may dwell in a soul for many years before the soul become conscious of the gift that it has been given. The humble love that such a gift requires can take years of constant vigilance and silent readiness. Steeping the imagination in holy images prepares the soil. Baptizing our intelligence with revealed truth makes the necessary space. Surrendering affections and offering painful sorrows with love draws this powerful blessing. 

This hidden secret cannot be grasped by mental gymnastics or intellectual feats.  This deepest spiritual truth evades the proud and powerful. The wise of this world are confounded by its simplicity. The clever stumble over its shocking liberty.  Only poor beggars are ready for this hidden bounty.

Pierced and disjointed in helter-skelter agony, hung on dead splintered wood between heaven and earth, the last wordless cry of the Word of the Father fills the empty voids of this world with this living fullness. It flows like a font from the deepest center of Holy Spirit bathed baptized souls. It falls like rain on the contrite and runs like streams from their eyes to their hearts. Its fragrance awakens and draws love. It shakes the foundations of human existence and rips open the veils that separate Bride from Bridegroom.  

Such is the august mystery of the Holy Trinity. An endless sea of love and life flows immutably from its tenderness toward humanity while its patient purpose remains un-thwarted by our hostility.  Oh,  that we might share in that same great stillness that this boundless Presence knows -- the peace of love poured out and received. In this magnificent stillness is the humble Greatness that resists our pride and the gentle Immensity that silences our aggression.

Generously implicated in our misery, the Father sends His Son in the power of His Spirit again and again into our hearts anew -- a pure, total and personal gift -- as if always for the first time. For, in the image of the unrepeatability of God's majesty, this astonishing gift never comes the same way twice.  A personal gift of mutual relations, enkindling with bright warm splendor, this indwelling mystery is the hidden uncreated form of every created gift of self given and received in love.  

Only the Love of God the Father Can Restore Us

The moral and spiritual crisis of our time is a crisis in fatherhood - a refusal to allow the Father to love us and the lack of courage to reveal the Father's love and concern for the most vulnerable.  We see this reflected in the mentality that Church problems are fixed by money and programs - rather than conversion of heart and prayer. Just as no program can heal the heart of a child as much as the love of father and mother, no committee or policy can heal the Church apart from the love of God the Father. Yet, because so many have been abused or neglected by their fathers, we are afraid to draw attention to God the Father.

We see the Father as neither comfortable or convenient politically, socially or culturally.  We pretend that we do not come from Him and that we are not in His image and likeness. We presume that we have a right to take the blessings that belong to the Father, and to use them for our own social agendas and projects. To live on our own terms rather than His, we distance ourselves from His Love.

Since we will not draw close to our heavenly Father, we ourselves have forgotten how to be fathers.   Afraid to offend against dehumanizing ideologies, we do not speak of the Father's goodness or wisdom, or offer His blessing to those who most need it. Shamed into silence and afraid to sound unsophisticated, we have allowed heartless jargon to replace what we can only find if we go to the heart of the Father. And fatherless societies beget walking wounded, children whose gaping emptiness torments them ... even to the point that to relieve the pain, they abuse themselves and others. These fatherless children become adults -- and now we live with generations suffering this nihilistic vacuum in which all that is innocent, good, holy, and true is sucked away. Even those who we trust have become like pigs -- and have we not been drawn to their sty?

The love of the Father is so much more, so far beyond, so much more beautiful and tender than the limits of our feeble hearts allow us to feel or know. We are afraid of his paternal affection because we will not allow ourselves to become familiar with it -- we are ignorant of just how much we are loved to our own downfall.  If only we would calm the internal rancor of our own thoughts and allow ourselves to listen to the deep movements of tender concern and gentle understanding that live in His Word!

To be kissed by the Father, to be taken into HIs embrace, this is no less than to surrender into a love that at once heals, purifies, reconstitutes, and transforms. This is the Gift of the Holy Spirit - its intensity and power cannot be overestimated. Such loves moves us against presumption to penance; against callousness to make restitution; against arrogance to humbly atone for what unaided human effort can never atone. The sheer immensity of the Father's love raises us above ourselves -- not only in our giftedness and excellences, but in our weaknesses and inadequacies -- especially in the painful voids. Yes, there where love seems most absent, the Father is there with us -- aching over our humiliation and shame, with life giving tears.

The Father's heart is pierced by the plight of his children -- He is never indifferent or aloof. This is what we read in the story of the Prodigal Son... Luke 15:11-32. The Father is deeply moved when He sees His son coming from a long way off.  The verb in Greek for "to pity, to have compassion" (ἐσπλαγχνίσθη) means that the deepest parts of one's very being are moved, implicated, in the plight of another. This is the same word used in the parable of the Good Samaritan. It is also used when Jesus sees the crowds who have come to follow him.

When applied to God the Father, this means that the mysterious depths of God are implicated in our plight ... that like of Father of the Prodigal Son, God the Father has taken our side. He is already running to us, ready to embrace, to kiss us with the affections of His love for us. Anyone who allows himself or herself to become the object of the Father's love, such a person becomes like the Father, capable of being moved by the plight of those in distress. Such a movement of heart never sees strangers or enemies to be feared or used ... only family to be cherished.

We live at a time when all of us need to come to our senses and consider how generous and good the Father is to everyone who serves Him.  Betrayal, denial, abandonment are not more patient than this healing love that both awaits and evokes our contrition. Avoiding responsibility has baptized us in desperate plight - it is time for the courage to face who we are, what we have done and to whom we have done it. No program or policy can  replace humility. No optics or media spin can heal the shame or cure the wounds we have caused. We may not feel that we are worthy to be his sons or daughters -- but the One who begets, who loves life, wants us to live life to the full.

To approach the Father, we must follow the way of His Son - empty ourselves of our projects and ambitions, humble ourselves about our need for salvation, die to ourselves and our hubris. We approach Him in penance, fasting and prayer, realizing that in the immensity of His generous love, we are not worthy to be his slaves for His Son took the form of a slave... and, on this very cross road that His Son trod, the Father runs to meet us with the same love that He bears "the One in whom I am well pleased". And in a silent fullness, we feel at once the comfort of His embrace; and the overwhelming goodness of His kiss. Healing and restoration await in the tender touch of those wetted cheeks and in those tears, divine and human, mingled through that hoped for, but surpassing, joy. 

The Holy Trinity and a Foretaste of Heaven

Saint Elisabeth of the Trinity's spiritual mission is to promote mental prayer through devotion to the Holy Trinity.  One of her most important spiritual works is a prayer that she wrote just after her novitiate.  In this prayer, she makes a personal claim over the Trinity, "My Three",  "my All", "my Beatitude." Through learning to pray like this, those who are dedicated to prayer have found a way to deepen their devotion to the indwelling of the Divine Persons of the One God.

Saint Elisabeth helps souls move past meditations on the Trinity that are overly abstract and depersonalized.  She invites a vision of the Three-in-One and One-in-Three that is at once personal and Biblical. She sees a dynamic unity in the personal relations of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit that evokes from the soul a response of praise. The Father contemplates and blesses the truth His Word reveals in us and the Word of the Father yearns that we might know the same glory He himself knows. Through the Holy Spirit, this Great Mystery buries itself in the soul, overshadows it, catches it on fire, captivates it, and establishes it in peace. In this "infinite solitude" and "immensity" of love the soul forgets itself, loses itself, buries itself and becomes pure praise.

To allow oneself to be completely captivated by the Holy Trinity is to secure a foretaste of heaven. When the Trinity ceases to be a puzzle and becomes an object of devotion for the heart, the greatness of Christian prayer opens up. The eternal splendor that lives in such a soul is no fantasy or abstract thought - it is, in Saint Elisabeth's own last words, "light, love, life." Such a heavenly in breaking is not in the remote future, but a reality born already in time, making this present moment a kind of sacrament, "eternity begun, and still in progress." 

A Missionary Disciple and the Gift of God

The disciples of the Risen Lord are missionary.  They are sent out by Him into the world to be messengers of Divine Mercy, and their teaching is not their own. They know that they have been entrusted with a pearl beyond price, the mustard seed, the one thing that does not fail when all else fails around them. They declare what they have heard because what they hear has turned their whole world upside down and given them ground on which to stand, rock on which to build, "If you knew the Gift of God."

They are sent out because the One sent to them commands them.  Raised from their sight, and at the same time, always mysteriously present in new and surprising ways, they follow in the footsteps of their Crucified Master.  Their mission is to reveal His love in the face of alienation and hostility, to bring action filled words of hope into hopeless situations, to propose and re-propose faith for eyes yet unable to glimpse the glory of God. In all this and so much more, they long to satisfy the great thirst by which Christ cries out, "If you knew the Gift of God."

The One who conquered death asks the Father to send Tongues of Fire to these disciples whom He has sent. Thus, this Mysterious Breath from the Heart of Father and Son breathes in them, sealing the deepest interior of their hearts with the freedom to offer their lives in love. The Father and the Son have always delighted in this excess of joy because in sovereign freedom They forever seal their own love with this Consuming Fire.  Now in pure jubilation, because the Risen Lord has asked it and because all things are given Him, the frailest creature can also know this Uncreated Gift until one's whole being echoes, "If you knew the Gift of God."

Missionary disciples live by breathing in the Holy Spirit's animating presence through which with great delicacy He lavishes on them spiritual gifts of every kind. New and unfamiliar wonders bathe these souls as their whole existence aches with both the exultation of heavenly canticles and the heart-piercing cry of the most vulnerable, the very same music resounding in the depths of God. In this symphony of truth, the true disciple discovers how to rest in the tenderness of God and, even more, how to be so tender with God that He might rest in them, "If you knew the Gift of God."

The intensity with which the Fire of God's Love burns in them is the same intensity that propels them out into the most painful of life's problems.  Into the dangerous peripheries of society and into the troubled heart of a family, for the sake of both friends and enemies alike, the missionary disciple is not afraid to enter with the peace of Christ. Animated by the Spirit, these disciples breathe forth a hidden fruitfulness so super-abundant, this life is too short and limited to hold it all.  Even in their dying breath, one can hear them sing, "If you knew the Gift of God."

A missionary disciple is a soul lit ablaze, a fiery icon of love and truth, a window through which the joy of heaven shines with life saving splendor. By making of their bodies a living sacrifice, true spiritual worship, such missionary souls offer divine warmth, light and life to a cold, dark and dying world. Through these generous souls, even when brutally rejected and scorned unto death, the joy from on high is revealed here below, especially where it is most needed.  Because they have sung sealed with the Holy Spirit, others now sing "If you know the Gift of God." 

The Three in One and One in Three

I arise today by the mighty name of the Trinity -- the Three in One and One in Three.
These words from St. Patrick's Breastplate speak to a dimension of prayer which is regularly neglected.  Most people think that prayer is for pansies.  On the contrary, prayer is not about emoting or appearing pious or simply achieving a state of enlightenment.  Prayer takes supernatural courage. It is about the victory of good over evil in our lives, our role in a primordial conflict the apocalyptic consummation of which will usher in new heavens and a new earth. In this vein, the ancient Lorica attributed to St. Patrick presents prayer as a call to battle and the Name of God as the banner of the Christian cause.

We stand when we recite the creed and profess the Trinity - as if we were preparing for battle, as if bracing against an onslaught, as if preparing to charge.  When we do this, we are declaring that at the center of the world is uncreated Love - and that everything comes from and goes to this Love.  Our profession is to fight for this love, to defend it, to promote it come what come may.

To rise up, to stand, to take a stand, to stand firm - this gesture speaks to what might be considered a violent dimension of Christian faith. Yes, there are things for which to put our lives on the line -- and our living our faith to the full is just such a thing.  Here, standing is a gesture of Christian prayer because the prayer given by Christ in the Holy Spirit is prayer in a time of war.  The whole cosmos, visible and invisible, is in mortal combat over God's love and in many ways we are standing behind enemy lines.

Whatever the peace Christ has left us -- it is not the kind of peace in which all conflict has ceased.  Instead, it seems to be a peace that we possess even in our darkest moment, in the very face of our enemies.  And so we stand.  We choose to be faithful to our baptismal promises - promises to renounce evil, to not waiver in our faith in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and this even to the shedding of our blood. We accept the challenge of our faith in the Three in One and One in Three. We make ready for the contest under the mighty Name of the Trinity.

The battles we must fight do not involve shadow-boxing.  If we are to realize the victory of good over evil in our hearts, we must fight the good fight.  If we are to taste the triumph of the children of God, we must run the race so as to win.  To finally be the free men and women God has destined us to be, we must step into the arena of prayer and daily life to take up battle.  Love itself requires such a battle - through all kinds of difficulties and trials -- because one cannot love except at one's own expense.

Our battle is not merely against human forces.  We do wrestle with ourselves: the self-indulgence, insobriety and anxiety which would threaten our hope if we do not keep our eyes fixed on the Lord.  We also wrestle with the world: its standards, its hostility to the truth, its fear of holiness.  But most of all, we fight against the malice of super-intelligent beings bent on our eternal destruction - these foes, stronger and wiser than we, know just what to suggest to rob us of all courage, and their demoralizing lies cut to the heart.  Indeed, they are impossible to overcome without divine assistance - and yet God makes them the instruments of our growth into spiritual maturity, using their malice to make His love invincible in our hearts.

We fight also with God -- sometimes seemingly against Him, like Israel in his desire to receive a blessing. We fight to surrender our will to His Will, our minds to His Mind, our life to His Life.  How is it that we who are so frail are challenged by God into such a contest?  God has created us in his own image and He knows that the courage He has given in the hearts of men and women reflect the greatness of his own heart.  And so, in his Name and for his sake, we arise and stand fast!  We make our case before the Living God, acknowledging our guilt and pleading for his mercy - but in his mercy daring to ask, daring to trust that he will look on our boldness with loving kindness, because He himself put that boldness in us.

To fight for life, for truth, for love: these are things instilled in us -- especially by our fathers.  If our natural fathers were not able to teach this -- then we need spiritual fathers who will.  Such fatherhood requires dedication, courage and generosity.  And I am so grateful to the men I have known who have made this dedication, this courage, this generosity their own.  It is the greatness I see in the eyes of faithful priests and good dads.

That men should often fall short of so high a calling should not be surprising even if it is always heartbreaking and disappointing.  The big fat ego dies hard and only after a lot of suffering.  Yet those who allow the Lord to chastise them, that is - who choose to be sons who are loved - such pillars are the strength of our families and our Church.  They witness to a love which is stronger than death.  It is the love of the Father that radiates in such fatherhood - because such fatherhood, rooted in Christ and filled with the Spirit, gives God the Father the space He needs to shine forth in this world.  It is this same eternal love by which we each arise in the name of the Trinity.

The Living Presence of the Holy Trinity

Bl. Elisabeth of the Trinity witnesses to the living presence of the Holy Trinity.  In her theological vision, the Trinity is not an abstract puzzle which must be solved or the object of intellectual despair.  This is because very early on in own her life she felt the overwhelming love of God.  This love ravished her soul and she welcomed it and surrendered to it.  Rather than an abstract dogma, we find her addressing the Trinity in personal terms of endearment "my Three," "my All," and "my Beatitude."  Rather than a static idea, the Holy Trinity is for her ever actively present in the soul, constantly at work, continually rebuilding by love what we thought we destroyed.  The Trinity is no nihilistic, closed or absorbing reality.  Instead, the Trinity is so open and accessible that her writings suggest we only become most fully the creature we are predestined to be in Christ through completely entering into this mystery and allowing God to enter into us.  The Three in One and One in Three is our true home, the fulfillment of all desire, our inheritance with the saints, the Abyss of Mercy, the Furnace of Love, our heavenly homeland.

Access to this unfathomable mystery she describes in terms of  a wholly simple and loving movement, a gaze of love, a descent, a divine impact, an astonishing encounter with the Triune God.  To lovingly attend to God's living presence is to remain, to surrender, and to dwell with Him.  This kind of deep prayer, which she calls holy recollection or even contemplation, allows God to completely envelop and immovably establish the soul in the peaceful stillness of the Bosom of the Trinity.  It is the method of not using a method to approach God.  Rather, God crucified for our sake is approached in such humble gratitude of heart, it yields a "not knowing" of anything but Him and his great love.  She describes this kind of contemplation as primarily God's work which we make space for by self-denial and silence.  The soul humbly asks and obediently waits.  The Father engenders the Son and causes Love to be born in the heart.  In her vision of prayer, not only do we come to rest in the Holy Trinity - but God is transforming our hearts, renewing the image of the Trinity on earth.

Such prayer is purifying, simplifying, humbling and, at the same time, glorifying.  Blessed Elisabeth understood that our humble trust in Him makes us irresistible to Him.  He lavishes us with incalculable blessings, exceeding every expectation, and raising us above ourselves to participate in his very life.  For her, the weaknesses we discover in prayer do not impede God's work but instead become instruments through which He is revealed.  Human frailty is meant to be enveloped in divine splendor - and this is achieved in the deep silence of loving surrender to his living presence.  Through humbly clinging in love to the living presence of the Holy Trinity we become what we are predestined to be: the praise of glory.

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."

The Trinity and Real Love

It is a false friendship when one friend dominates another. Some think that the nature of God is so overwhelming that as we approach it, there is no space for our humanity. For them, humanity is completely consumed and absorbed by the divine. Others think that the Divine Nature is so trancendent and totally 'other', there is no way really to relate to it intimately. Relationship with God is a kind of external contractual thing - a master-slave relationship. But these attitudes are not Christian. Our faith tells us that the Lord is constantly coming to us in new ways extending the most intimate of frienships because he wants us to thrive - not in the material sense, but spiritually so that all the powers of our freedom, intellectual and emotional capacities realize their full potential -and we become most fully ourselves. This is what real friendship does and this is what God wants in our friendship with Him.

Real love leaves space for the other give oneself in love to another and at the same time to possess the other in his or her own freedom. This kind of love characterizes the inner-life of the Trinity. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit bound in one nature and one love do not absorb or dominate each other. In their one love, each Divine Person has the freedom to love within the unique subsistant relation He enjoys. We have come to understand the Divine Persons in terms of subsistent relations because their mutual relations as Father, Son and Holy Spirit eternally subsist in their One Divine Nature. In other words, Divine Nature is relational with itself. It is precisely because God enjoys eternal relations in his very being, precisely because God is Trinity, that real love is eternal.

Real love requires real relationship - and true relations require persons, a free personal center in a free relation to another. In the case of God, the Divine Persons share the same freedom, the same real eternal love, according to their true relations as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. If God were not in his very Nature relational from all eternity, love itself would not be eternal. Love would merely be a by product of creation. Yet in passionate love, there is something that looks to the eternal, that yearns to overcome the limits of time and space, to have perfect unity with another. It is with good reason that poets like Dante have seen in this human experience an opening to something Divine that preceded it. Indeed, human love is the creation of a real Divine Yearning that preceded it in power and existence. The Divine Persons yearn for and enjoy the fruition of communion with one another in their One Nature and out of this one Nature this Divine Yearning is the source for all that is.

Devotion to the Trinity

Perhaps because of the way the mystery is preached, many of those who begin to pray struggle with devotion to the Trinity. Instead of openness to an unsurpassable mystery of love, there can be a kind of frustration with mental gymnastics that make God into an inaccessible abstraction. Yet the Church proclaims the Trinity as the central dogma of our faith. In doing so, it struggles to authentically pass on the mystery revealed in Christ Jesus. Complete grasp of this mystery is beyond our natural power to attain and here the very limits of dogmatic formulae are tested. Ultimately, however, what is required is the simple acceptance that faith alone makes possible, the surrender of our will to the unfathomable love of God the mystery of the Trinity discloses.

Faith is the only way we gain access to a real contemplation of the Trinity. Anything else is simply the work of our own imagination aping what we fantasize the experience to be like. For those inclined to various methods, bear in mind that imagining that one is not imagining is not the same as the movement of faith. Faith is not even spending time choosing not to think or not to imagine or not to remember anything. Faith is a gift from the Holy Spirit, animating everything with love for Father and resting in nothing but the Lord Himself.

What makes faith in the love of the Father authentic is that it is rooted in the mind of Christ which is ours through the Gift of the Holy Spirit. Faith is looking on the world with the resurrected eyes of Christ – ever hopeful eyes that see ever new ways to love. Those who see the world this way are not afraid of being pierced by the plight of others, because they follow Someone pierced for their own sins who has overcome sin by rising from the dead. The humanity of Jesus became our access to the Father when Jesus offered himself on the cross. The Holy Spirit is the One who moves us to the Cross, makes it become alive for us by convicting us of sin while at the same time communicating the inexhaustible depths of the Father's merciful love.

How much this love costs! We want to reject such love because it seems too much and we are afraid of losing ourselves. But the Lord is not easily thwarted by our attempts to hide from Him. He has been searching for us since Adam and Eve first despised Him - and his own love prevents Him from abandoning us. How God aches whenever this love is rejected – and through the Cross He helps us to ache with Him in our weakness. Faith alone opens our hearts to the Divine Beauty of God’s Triune life.

The Trinity - the enchanting harmony of divine love

How can we describe the kind of contemplation devotion to the Trinity opens to us? One of the Fathers - if someone knows who it is, I cannot find my research on this observation but I think psuedo-Dionysius - contemplates an analogy of the Trinity with a musical chord – a perfect triad of notes from whose creative resonance all things flow. Like a musical chord which penetrates the depths of the heart, each Person freely acts with in the one freedom in the perfect harmony of one triune love - one note does not absorb the others nor do the parts of the chord cancel each other out. Contemplating the Trinity is like listing to music – in his Life of Moses, Gregory of Nyssa calls this the mysterious siren sound that echoed in the contemplation of the People of Israel encamped at Mt. Sinai. (See Exodus: 19:19.)

At this point, we might take our cue from Gregory of Nyssa who describes a resonance of heart in this mystery of the One and Three. Speaking to those about to be baptized, he explains his experience of God as his Divine Companion, “I have not even begun to think of unity when Trinity bathes me in its splendor. I have not even begun to think of the Trinity when unity grasps me. (Oratio 40.41 – as cited in Catechism of the Catholic Church #256)

In musical terms, we might describe his observation as follows: one cannot attend to any one of the triad notes without being taken up into their unity, and at the same time, one cannot attend to the captivating resonance of the triad without being overwhelm by the distinct quality of each note. The Father’s love for each of us revealed in Christ Jesus and communicated to us in the Holy Spirit is symphonic. It implies a range of harmonies that are beyond our power to hear – the very inner life of God, and yet it is our dignity to participate in by grace.

To participate in the music of God – this is to make of our life the praise of his glory. In the enjoyment of this perfect song of love, the heart contemplating it at once feels lost in a mystery that seems to completely absorb it -- and curiously at the same time, feels at home, more distinctly itself than it has ever been before. Something like the Unity of nature and distinction of Persons in the mystery of the Trinity becomes the rhythm of its own heart in relation to God, and then curiously in relation to all those entrusted to it. Elisabeth of the Trinity explains throughout her writings that this is the great canticle we will sing without cease at the end of time, and that we begin to sing it even now in faith- its harmonies taking up the whole of our life and establishing the lyre of our hearts in the divine melody flowing from the very Heart of God.

The Trinity our Home

When Elisabeth of the Trinity wrote a retreat for her sister, the first thing she did to encourage the young mother was to describe the Trinity as our home, the place where we out to dwell. Elisabeth knew that her sister would resonate with this image because she herself was making a home for her husband and infant children. When one is at home, one finds the space to be oneself and at the same time the freedom to give oneself in love. It is the eternal plan of the Father that each of us should discover in the unity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit this same freedom and space so that we might become whom He has predestined us to be from all eternity. For Elisabeth, this means finding our home in the Trinity allows us to become the praise of God's glory. The Church affirms the mystery of the Three in One and One in Three because when we carefully ponder it, we are drawn by it into the very heart of our faith. In this reflection, we will ponder what it means to be “person,” in what way God is Three Persons and finally our need for communion with the Trinity.

To be person is to have the potential to be at once a gift for another and the possessor of the gift of another. We first experience the gift of another person’s love as an infant, and this experience forms us to give ourselves in love. A mother's love surrounds us in the womb and when we come forth into the world, her breasts sustain us and her loving hands console us. St. Augustine explains that we do not have distinct memories of this experience. But these experiences nevertheless began to form us. As we encounter others beyond our mother, first and foremost, our father, we become aware of relationships - we distinguish ourselves from others and discover that they like us are free, and that this freedom can be used to love.

Yet from time primordial we have used this freedom very imperfectly to our own peril. But for the absence of love in our hearts where love ought to be, each of us would have been completely nurtured in love into adulthood. We know all to well that our noble desire for true friendship is subject to futility; and we are much too at home with our capacity to betray and deny our friendships -- just as was done to us by those we most trusted to have loved us. We yearn for love we do not have, burdened with guilt for something beyond and behind our own guilty actions, and haunted by the thought of our own mortality.

The Divine Persons are not like any created person for they do not exist in the merely potential but live completely and always in the actual – They are an eternal now allowing each moment that we experience to exist for us. Mystics like Elisabeth of the Trinity emphasize that to love the Trinity is to begin to realize that eternal now already in time – their exceeding love for us creates the present moment and makes it a kind of sacrament in which we can find God. Yet this is only a beginning. Even if there are angelic powers that have always used their freedom to love perfectly - the perfection of that love is contingent on and circumscribed by the creative action of an eternal and unending act of love in which dwell the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The mutual freedom in love shared by each Divine Person in his distinct relations reveals a co-eternal ‘spiritual space’ at the heart of all true love.

Beauty Ever Ancient Ever New

In my last post, I promised to speak more about the Divine Economy. The Divine Economy concerns all of God's dealing with creation. It is distinguished from the inner-life of God, a reality inaccessible to us but revealed through the Divine Economy.

Knowing the divine economy is the only way we have insight into the communion of love which is the inner life of the Trinity. Another way of saying this is we can only know God through the humanity of Christ. Christ alone, the Image of the Invisible God, can reveal God. The Divine Economy is most fully realized in the humanity of the Lord Jesus.

The Divine Economy reveals the Trinity -- but the Trinity is so much more. Those who say "yes" to the Gift of God offered in this economy of salvation find themselves drawn to this mystery, caught up into it. Anyone who does not see this will never understand why the ancient Christians so fiercely debated the dogmas about Christ and the Trinity. They were trying to protect and hand on the mystery they had received, that they knew in their hearts. The ancient Christians, and Christians of the East to this day, consider contemplation of the inner-life of God "theology". This sort of theology (mystical theology or experiential theology) is completely different from what is deemed academic theology today. It is more a matter of the very core of one's person - a prayer of the heart - offered in the deepest sanctuary of man. Those who want to experience the Holy Trinity are exhorted by the great saints to enter into the silence of prayer and search for the Lord in the depths of one own self. The reason this kind of theology is possible in this way is because the Trinity dwells in this deepest center of who we are. The Trinity is present: more fully present to us than we are to ourselves. This mystery is what Jesus establishes and reveals to us through the Gift of the Holy Spirit - the Gift that moves the Divine Economy from something we speak about to a reality we live.

In fact, the English word "economy" comes from a Greek term meaning "the management of one's household." God the Father manages his household in such a way that our hearts find their home in Him and He in us. Along these lines, Elisabeth of the Trinity, a 19th Century Carmelite who loved to spend time searching for the Lord in her heart, asserted that our true home is in the bosom of the Trinity. She explained to her married sister that we are not present to God as slaves but as sons - participants in the eternal Sonship of Christ Jesus. The human heart is where God makes his home and His Heart is the only place where the our hearts can be at home.
The divine economy has two dimensions: the visible and socially historic, and the invisible and personally spiritual. By this I mean that God has created a visible and invisible cosmos - things that are seen and others that are not. His economy extends to both these realms. In the visible universe we see the work of creation and all of salvation history. The prophets, the priests and kings were all the instruments of his great faithfulness to us. The promises they revealed were fulfilled in the most wonderful and unimaginable way when the Father sent his only begotten Son. Jesus, the visible image of the invisible God, the Word made Flesh, the author and perfector of our faith: through his life, death and resurrection He perfectly revealed the eternal plan of the Father. A fully historical, completely concrete, scandalously particular man, He was rejected and put to death because the Holy Spirit revealed through Christ's miracles and teachings that Jesus himself was God. By his ascension into heaven and the sending of the Holy Spirit into the Church, those who have faith in Jesus and are baptized become actual members of his glorified Body - revelators of the love of the Father to the world.


In all these visible works, the Lord has manifested himself and become present to us in ever new and more surprising ways. You might say He is a wild and untamed God: no system can contain Him or anticipate the splendors of His love He continues to manifest through his saints. This should be developed so much more - but I simply list it now to give a small taste of what God has made visibly manifest.


Just a note about the incomprehensible transcendent love of God: Some think they have figured God out with their own limited rationality. C.S. Lewis struggled with a form of this on his path to Christianity. The religions of the East seem to answer the deficiencies of the moralizing God taught to him in his youth. But even in his conflicting attractions to atheism and pantheism, it was as if he wanted to define what God can and cannot do - what He can and cannot be. What he discovered was that the only god limited rationality can arrive at is a static, stale and dry passionless idea. It was compelling for him that everything was absorbed in this one thing. But in this effort, as intellectually satisfying as it was, something did not fully resonate. In the back of his mind there was a huanting suscipicion that there might be something more.


In fact, to see God as a thing, even an absorbing thing, to believe that all things are this one thing is to lose the point altogether. God is not a thing among other things nor even the only thing. Whatever we think we mean by thing - God is totally other: incomprehensible in his power, his knowledge, his essence. But to those who receive the Holy Spirit, the splendor of his glory is manifest to their faith - his ineffable love and inscrutable plan is revealed in their hearts.


Thankfully, God does not limit his being or activity to some idealized spectrum of human ideas. This was one of the things that C.S. Lewis would have discovered when he read G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy. While for now I do not have time to compare Lewis's Surprised by Joy with Chesterton's Orthodoxy - they make a great comparison. For our purposes, it will have to suffice to say that God is physical, concrete, particular, historical in his great love for us because He loves all that He has made, especially the irreplaceable uniqueness of each person He has willed into being. He yearns with a friendship love for us and this yearning has moved him to become like us in all things but sin - and this has opened up for us the possibility of being like Him in all things when we renounce sin and cling to him.


In this is fulfilled Jesus Christ's great desire, the prayer He prayed the night before He died: that we might be one in Him as He is in the Father. This is the communion He thirsts for with each of us and all of us together. The human person was created in the very image and likeness of God because the ultimate end of all of this is the perfect unity of creatures with the Holy Trinity. (See the Catechism of the Catholic Church, #260.)


Yet he not only works in the concrete particularity that characterizes our day to day existence in the real world. He also works invisibly. St. Thomas Aquinas speaks of the spiritual missions of the Son and the Spirit.



Here we come to the main theme: God is Beauty ever ancient and ever new. He is before all that is - the 3,000 to 5,000 year old Bristlecone symbolizes this. Biblically, we were scarcely out of the Garden when this tree is thought to have sprouted on the earth - yet after all these millennia its fir is soft and full of life. And unlike a Pullman novel or the picture of the dead Bristlecone at the top of this article: He is never old, never exhausted, never spent. Christian life coming from God is similar: this life is more ancient than creation itself because it is the very life of God. And, at the same time, it is ever fresh, new and childlike. Inexhaustible and unimaginable - it is the Lord's greatest surprise. Christianity is not a religion of old gurus on mountains who have grown cynical toward life-- it is the faith of the children of God who have only now begun to live.



In our next post we will consider the progression or new creation that God's new life ignites in us. We will see that He constantly gives himself to us in new ways to deepen our friendship and to equip us with everything we need for the great work with which He desires to entrust us. (Photos by Fr. John Gracey, Pastor of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Bishop, CA)

Trinity Sunday

At the heart of all true Christian spirituality is the great mystery of the Holy Trinity. This mystery revealed by Jesus is communicated directly into the depths of our hearts by faith in Him. Some people see the mystery as a puzzle to be solved and yet never solvable. Others try to describe the reality of Three Divine Persons in One God as a triangle or shamrock or some other metaphor. While some of these insights on occasion shed some light and answer some questions, very few of them actually lead to a deeper contemplation of the mystery. For those not content to approach God as a mere intellectual exercise, there are the great saints and mystics who have attempted to describe an experience of the Triune Godhead as something much more than a head-trip. This has been true since the very beginnings of our faith.

The Gospels profess the one God while at the same time they witness to the Father’s love of his “beloved Son,” Jesus’ love of his Heavenly Father and the Holy Spirit who is also the “promise of the Father”. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit live in perfect possession of one another – each enveloped and enveloping the other Divine Persons in eternal being, inexhaustible knowing, and infinite love. In fact, it is their mutual relations in their divine life, light and love that distinguish each Divine Person. Thus, it is of apostolic tradition, in our earliest creeds, that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are to be worshipped as one God. The Fathers of the Church called this one God ‘the Three’ at least as early as 180 A.D. (See http://tinyurl.com/23tfmq.) A 19th Century mystic recovers this original usage for the Western Church when she refers to the Trinity as “my Three, my All, my beatitude, infinite solitude, immensity in which I loose myself.”

We do not appreciate the gravity of such assertions, how absolutely surprising this revelation is. The idea of a passionate God who lives in an eternal movement of love is not what cold reason or cynical experience prepares one for. The wisdom of this age always aspires to a changeless, disinterested Absolute without passion. The pure, the altruistic, the ideal must be objective – never personal. But the Christian God was never experienced as a static heartless reality by the mystics. Pseudo-Dionysius even speaks of “Divine Eros.”

In his usage, eros is a love that yearns for union. Love in this sense involves intense passion, yearning desire, and unquenchable movement. It is like a raging fire. Changing things were considered less real than the unchanging eternal truths. But through their faith, they experienced an eternal Furnace of burning Love at the source of all that is – at once, ever ancient and ever new. They no longer believed in the distant, disinterested, dispassionate Divine Being of the philosophers – They clung the dynamic, jealous, Lover of the Hebrews – the Bridegroom of the Bride.

The Gift of the Holy Spirit, the freely given personal presence of God dwelling in them as in a Temple, communicated this divine passion to them. Because the Spirit is inseparable from the Son, every time they received this gift, they knew and enjoyed the presence of the Risen Lord in ever new ways. They asserted that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit share in an unchangeable movement of Love, an ineffable life of communion in one undivided Nature not merely because they were told that this was so, but because only assertions like this could explain what was unfolding in their own heart. God, One in Three and Three in One, was for them not a confounding puzzle, but a heart rending mystery. St. Gregory of Nanzianzus relates, “I have not even begun to think of unity when the Trinity bathes me in its splendor. I have not even begun to think of the Trinity when unity grasps me.”

Up until now, we have only considered the inner life of the Trinity as it is experienced through the divine indwelling. The presence of God is dynamic. It evokes a response of the heart. We can ignore this dynamism – but only by becoming hard hearted. But to live by love, accepting the enveloping call of this mystery of love is required. The unity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, the loving dynamism of their living communion, calls on the very depths of our existence. It is to this love our life is directed. It is through being enveloped in this mystery that we discover the truth of who we really are. But we do not share in the inner life of God by nature – we participate in his life by grace. It is to the Gift of the Holy Spirit and the gifts of the divine economy that we will turn to in our next post – because only through these gifts that we can glimpse God’s ultimate purpose, his dream for us to live in the bosom of the Holy Trinity.