Trinity Sunday 2021

By Sister Clare Carr, OSB

About 35 years ago, I was studying theology at St.Meinrads in Indiana during the summer.  The topic of the class was the Trinity.  At some point my thoughts wandered off and I was inspired by the notion that where there are two that love one another there is a third.  The fruit so to speak of the love between the two goes beyond themselves to another. That even God’s love needed to be in relationship, relationship between God the Creator, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.  If there is a healthy relationship between two, there is a new phenomenon that occurs a third way that comes from the love created by the two.  Like when a husband and wife love each other and create a child.  Or if two friends love and respect each other, they bring a presence to others that is inviting and loving, that is inclusive and hospitable.

God is love and whoever abides in love abides in God and God abides in them.  There is a temptation to believe that this scripture passage is meant for weddings or romantic love.  But we are missing the deeper meaning.  Rather God is most known in relationship (Godhead needed to be known in relationship), in community, family, and friendship.  God is in the flow between persons.  God at the table of the Lord, God at a family dinner table, God in a mutual exchange of compassion, care and forgiveness.

Ron Rolheiser says “By definition, God is ineffable, beyond imagination and beyond language, even the best language of theology and church dogma.  God can never be understood or captured adequately in any formula.  But God can be known, experienced, tasted, related to in love and friendship.  God is Someone and Something that we live within and which can flow thought our veins.”

God is a flow of relationships, to be known and experienced in community, family, and friendship.  When we live inside of these relationships, God lives inside us and we live inside God. 

…God is with us and in us, wrapped up

in our humanity,

 carrying the load, bearing the burden

of who we are, who we have been,

and who we

are becoming.

In a sense, God, the ultimate Creative Genius,

woke

up one morning with a great idea,

and that idea was you.

By Fr. Paul Boudreau

Buckminster Fuller once said, “God is a verb not a noun.”  God is active, present, earthy among us.  

God is domestic.  Although we monastics experience God, I believe that those of you who have families’ children, parents, know the nitty gritty challenge of loving, the grind and the earthiness of living.  The Triune God can be found in the care of a dying parent or spouse, in the long night of crying children, or across the table in a hectic effort of eat and get off to a meeting.  God is inside, where two or three are gathered there is God.  To be with God is to be in relationship, to be in community. 

Ronald Rolheiser says, “The most pernicious heresies that block us from properly knowing God are not those of formal dogma, but those of a culture of individualism that invite us to believe that we are self-sufficient, that we can have community and family on our own terms, and that we can have God with out dealing with each other.  But God is community—and only in opening our lives in gracious love and hospitality will we ever understand that.”