Three into One Goes

This Sunday, the Common Liturgy of the Christian Churches celebrate what is known as the Holy Trinity, the description of God, namely the Father, The Son and the Holy Spirit, three distinct Persons yet one God.  This may seem like the craziest thing to beleive in, and possibly there is yet no real answer as to what it is all about.  The concept did not exist before Christ came along and is based on His words describing Himself, his Father and His Spirit, indicating that the One God has three aspects, or Persons.  How idiotic a concept one would say.  Why not simply beleive in in One God, as the Jews and Muslims do, a God who has no competitor.  But the Papal preacher, Raniero Cantalamessa, a Capuchin monk, looks at it all rather simply.  He beleives that if God were merely One then we might find it difficult to beleive in Him as such a loving Person.  He might be seen as a very lonely person indeed, sitting up there onm His cloud in Seventh Heaven!

Yet Cantalamessa (left) describes God as the purification of love, so in his image as a Father, He is the One who loves; the Son therefore is the One who is loved by the Father and the result of their love for each other is the HolybSpirit who is the personification of that love.  Too simple for you?  Yet very understandable. It somehow satisfies my quest for understanding the mystery of the Trinity.

Another Italian priest, Blessed Giacomo Alberione (1884-1971), who is considered to the main instigator in the Catholic Church of using the mass media as a means of evangelisation, had a very lofty idea of God because he proclaimed that his Divine Master makes clear that Christianity will always remain a living paradox for the world - foolishness to some, a scandal to others.  "For us it is truth and divine reality. ...a Christian life lived completely according to the Gospel - sacrificing one's life to save it, losing it all to save all.  At the summit of this paradox, poverty becomes wealth; renunciation, exaltation; viriginity, maternity;  servitude, freedom; sacrifice, beatitude; service, apostolate; death, life!"   

 There is also one other interesting aspect to this attempt to understand the Trinitarian God. I had it explained to me as a reflection of our own lives.  As Alberione says in the above paragraph, God in His infinite love for his creation, man, tore out part of Himself and made that all the worse things we humans can think of, He made Him the exact opposite to His omnipotent Self -  He made Him small, He made Him weak, He made Him poor, He made Him unknown...such that He took on Himself all our sins and died a horrifying death - all to offer man the possibility of salvation which he somehow managed to lose through his choice to embrace sin rather than goodness. This is the personification of a love God can give.  Yet He has imbued man with the same kind of characteristics, because, as any parent will vouch, that role brings with it a sacrificing of one's life for one's children (who today easily rebut everything that their parents say or stand for), children who will ignore their ageing parents because they now seem expendible to them, tieing them down rather than giving them freedom (they don't realise that looking after their aged is not servitude but really is the freedom they are searching for!).  And this parent love makes one take on a role similar to that of the Father, and while we cannot imagine ourselves as gods yet the implementation of this kind of love in our own families is a personification of God. 

Three into one might be a mathematical misnomer but in the Divine, it somehow makes sense!  Does it with you?