Homily for Sunday, 16 June 2019– The Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity

Readings of the day: Proverbs 8:22-31; Psalm 8:4-5, 6-7, 8-9; Romans 5:1-5, John 16:12-15

Our brother Basilian priest of happy memory, Fr. Peter Etlinger, had little use for when people would compare our present time or experience with almost-mythical “good old days.” “Don’t tell me about the good old days,” Fr. Etlinger would grumble, “I was there; they weren’t so good”!

But does the Word of God we hear today not call us to remember the “good old days”? I do not mean to remember the “good old days” in the sense of imagining for ourselves a mythical golden age that never in fact existed, as if to diminish any good in our present world and present experience. No, the Book of Proverbs begins today by pointing us back to the very first moments of God’s creation of the universe, through a figure Proverbs names “the wisdom of God.”

Even before there were “good old days,” or any kind of days or nights to count; “before the earth” was formed; before heights and depths, “fountains or springs of water,” mountains, hills, or fields, the wisdom of God was there. And God’s creation of the world, of our universe, which “the wisdom of God” witnessed, was so very good. The Book of Proverbs is far from the first text of our Bible to marvel at the goodness of God’s creation. If we remember, in the very first lines of the Book of Genesis, after each “day” of God’s creation, God looks upon his creation and sees that it is good.

Yet in Genesis and even more so in Proverbs, the one being singled out as especially good, in whom God and “the wisdom of God” take particular delight, is us: “I found delight in the human race.” Why is this? What about all the chaos, the divisions, the violence, and the sin in our world; the suffering we human beings inflict on one another and on our world? What is there in “the human race” for God to delight in?

Even if there were no sin, no human-caused suffering in our world, our Psalm asks, “What [are we] that [God] should be mindful of” us; “the son of man that God should care for him”? And yet God has made us “little less than the angels”; little less than God himself. Why would God have made us so? Why does God delight in the human race so much?

This may be a completely inadequate answer on my part to such a deep question as why God should delight so much in “the human race,” but please let me do my best to answer this question here anyway. God delights in us so much because we are unique among creatures on earth in our ability to form relationships not only with one another but with our Creator, God. How many of us have looked up at the “heavens, the work of [God’s] fingers, the moon and the stars,” or looked out at nature and the life that fills it and thought, “Wow! It had to have taken an awesome creator—we call this creative being God—to make all this so beautifully and perfectly”?

How many of us have listened to the sounds that echo through this place and this Eucharistic celebration, both the expected sounds of the Mass itself, like its ritual and music, and more spontaneous sounds, like the cooing of small children? How many of us have thanked God for a success in life like a new job, a happy retirement, or graduation, or have prayed to God for any of these things? How many of us have thanked God for a good friend, or our wife or husband who, sacramentally, is the foremost person in our lives, for those of us who are married, who shows us the face of God and leads us to eternal life with God? How many of us have ever sought or received healing from God, for ourselves or for another person? How many of us, especially on this Father’s Day, have prayed and thanked God for our fathers or, for those among us whose fathers have gone to be with our Father in heaven, how many of us have prayed for our fathers to intercede for us and watch over us from on high?

In these and many more ways, we form relationships not only with one another but with our God, in a way that only we human beings can. And we also believe, fundamentally about ourselves as human beings, that we are created in God’s image and likeness. If this is so, then the God in whose image and likeness we are created, who enables us to marvel at God’s handiwork in his creation as “the wisdom of God” in Proverbs does; who enables us to ask for what we need from God and to thank God in prayer; to form relationships with one another and with God, must be a relational God.

But how can God be a relationship within God’s self—we speak of God as a relationship of three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—if we also believe that God is fundamentally one? This is at the heart of the mystery we celebrate on this Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity: God fundamentally one and fundamentally a relationship of three, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. This and any other true mystery cannot be explained logically, theo-logically, or with any increase in our “head knowledge.” The mystery of the Trinity, how God is one and also three, and any other true mystery, may only be comprehended through faith-filled experience.

This is what Jesus says to his disciples in John’s Gospel, from which we hear today. To try to comprehend mystery through our reason alone would overwhelm and even frustrate and sadden us: “You cannot bear it now,” Jesus says. We, like Jesus’ first disciples, have experienced relationship with God the Son, especially because God the Son took on our human nature, which maybe makes the Son easier for us to relate to than God the Father or the Holy Spirit. We have experienced relationship with God the Father from the first moments of creation, to the giving of the Law and the Prophets to Israel, to God’s sending of his only Son as one like us in all but sin. And now, through the Son, God sends us God’s Holy Spirit, our promised guide “to all truth.”

But we cannot absorb “all truth” all at once, without becoming overwhelmed, frustrated, and sad. In order to grow in relationship with and in our experience of the Holy Spirit; in order to grow in our comprehension of “all truth,” not taking it to the head but taking it to heart, requires time. It requires patience. It requires prayer. It requires us to be disposed to awe at the beauty of God’s creation that surrounds us.

The process of which St. Paul speaks to the Romans, that of the Holy Spirit, sent to us from the Father through the Son and “poured into our hearts”; the process from endurance to “proven character” to hope that “does not disappoint,” even in times of affliction, is a process of love. It is a process of growth in relationship. Those of us who have ever been in love, think about this: Did you go from attraction to somebody to the deepest intimacy, perhaps marriage, in an instant? Probably not.

The same is true of our faith-filled experience of the one God as Trinity; as a relationship of three, as of love: It takes time, patience, prayer, and a disposition to awe to allow it to grow and deepen. This does not happen in an instant, but over a longer process. And then, as happens in the best of relationships—imagine again a long, happy marriage or a great friendship—our experience of relationship in all its complexity draws us closer to oneness with the person with whom we enjoy the relationship. This is true of our relationship with God as it is with our relationships with one another: We experience God in an awesome multiplicity of ways. We enter into relationship with the God we experience and name as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and, as we grow and deepen in this relationship of love with God, we are drawn closer to oneness with God.

We are drawn closer to the appreciation of God’s oneness. But, as in our human relationships, we never lose our unique individual personalities in our relationship with God, and the distinction in the ways we experience God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is never lost. Our relationship with God, three-in-one, grows and deepens into a future in which, more and more, we comprehend and take to heart “all truth,” while still remembering fondly the “good old days” when God first made us, when we first knew delight in God and when God first “found delight in the human race.”