Holy Trinity

When Jesus came, he revealed to us the mystery of the Holy Trinity. It was his most important secret, his gift to us, which had been guarded for many centuries. In the Old Testament God didn’t want to show us this truth about himself, because he was afraid the Israelites would worship multiple gods. They did it regardless. The first time we hear about the Trinity is in the Annunciation, when the angel Gabriel mentioned the three persons. The second time was at the Baptism of Jesus, when we hear the voice of the Father and we see the white dove hovering over Jesus. The last time was when Jesus commanded us to baptise in the name of the Father, and on the Son and on the Holy Spirit. It is interesting to note that Jesus says in the name of the three persons as singular, not in the names as plural. One God, three persons.

They say that one is the symbol of unity. But to avoid uniformity, you need two. To avoid our modern pandemic of individualism and of selfishness, we need to be open to the other. Once you have two, you overcome these temptations, but other problems arise, fruit of relationships. The same happened with Adam and Eve, when the serpent managed to drive a wedge between them. With two, you can have trouble, opposition, war. You need two to fight. That’s why three is better, one can be a mediator and the struggle becomes more balanced, more diverse. Once we have three, we have a family. Two is a couple. When a baby arrives, it becomes a society. Our Lord says that when two or three are gathered in his name, he’ll be among us. Here we have the Trinity. All human relations are reflection of God’s inner life.

The Trinity shows us God as a family. He has opened his inner life to us, to be able to gaze into what’s happening within their trinitarian relationship. God has allowed our human nature to peep through a keyhole into his divinity. In the famous Rublev icon, we see the three angels who visited Abraham, representing the Holy Trinity, around a four- sided table. There is a place open for us at the front of this heavenly table, almost with our name on it. The figures are arranged in a way that the lines of their bodies form a full circle, waiting for us to sit, and close the circle. It is a relationship that flows inward and outward. We are called to participate in the trinitarian life, but only a few manage to do so. It is the most important task we can achieve in this life, the beginning of a heavenly life on earth.

We are very outward looking. We try to find happiness outside ourselves. In our secular culture is not easy to hear about God, to connect with him. Technology has brought us further and further from God. We can examine ourselves if we manage to find God on our smartphones. We are looking for him in the wrong places.

We forget that God is inside of us. “You must seek me in yourself”, Jesus told Saint Teresa. This is how Saint Elizabeth of the Trinity reminds us of this reality: “God in me, I in Him. Let that be our motto. How good is this presence of God within us, in the inner sanctuary of our souls. There we always find Him even though we may have no sensible feeling of His presence. But He is there, all the same. It is there that I love to seek Him. Let us try never to leave Him alone.”

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