Get Up! Get Out There! Part II: Trinity Sunday

After Pentecost Sunday, we celebrated two glorious Sundays that usher us into Ordinary Time, Trinity Sunday and Corpus Christi. The former celebrates the triune nature of One God in Three Divine Persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The latter calls attention to the true presence of Christ - Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity - in the Eucharist under the appearance of simple bread and wine. I could live a century more, spending the entire time praying, meditating, studying and writing about both of those sacred truths of Holy Mother Church, and I would barely be scratching the surface. Still, nonetheless, we need to delve deeper into our supernatural faith to grow in it, so I hope and pray that what I put to the page (or screen as the case may be) will light a fire in all who read this to do so. I'll stick to Trinity Sunday today, and hopefully I can get to Corpus Christ before Advent rolls around.

I had heard a story (thanks Father Dominick) of a missionary priest who had been assigned to a remote village. A donor had sent, through him, the gift of a sundial for the villagers. The priest was thrilled, as it would give him an opportunity to teach the people to use it to tell time. Not even knowing at first what it was, the villagers were so delighted with the gift from this distant donor that they put it in the middle of the village. Their excitement grew when they learned of the ability to tell time with it. They were so pleased with it, they wanted no damage to come to it, so they built a roof over it to protect it from the elements. In many ways, we do the same thing with the belief in the Trinity. We are overjoyed when we first come to the Faith, although we don't understand entirely. Then we learn a little, and grow in our love for the Holy Trinity. Finally, fearing the idea that criticisms and questioning might somehow damage our faith in this doctrine, we don't talk about it. By our failure to let it out in the open, we hide the glory of the Trinity from others. To paraphrase St. Augustine, the truth is a lion. It does not need you to defend it. Let it out, and it will defend itself.

What I heard after the story this Trinity Sunday was a challenge to pray to the Holy Trinity as a whole. We very often pray to God the Father for certain things, to Jesus Christ, God the Son, for some, and to the Holy Spirit for others. I was challenged, because it pushed me to understand beyond the boundaries of my mind in a way that only God can put there, not my own attempts to reason out intellectually. At a time like this present age, when the family is under attack in so many ways, we need to be open to the Trinity more than ever, for as St. John Paul II said, "God in His deepest mystery is not a solitude, but a family, since he has in himself fatherhood, sonship and the essence of the family, which is love. This subject of the family is not, therefore, extraneous to the subject of the Holy Spirit." Dr. Scott Hahn, in an interview I had once seen and wish I could find, points out that the late pope does not say God is like a family, but that God is a family. He goes on to say it is more accurate to say the Hahn's are like a family. What is the difference between God as solitude and God as family? This is one Scott Hahn talk I was able to find.

The concept of God as family is the best way that we can understand the concept of the Trinity. One of the simplest, and therefore least prone to error, explanations I saw of the Trinity was in a picture in a copy of the Baltimore Catechism. It had a triangle, with each point or angle having the name of one of the Persons of the Trinity. On the inside was the word, "God." On each of the sides of the triangle, it had the words, "is not." From each angle to the center was a line with the word, "is." A quick search yielded the same picture here. Just as in many ways, earthly things imperfectly reflect heavenly things, so humanity, created in God's image and likeness, reflects this reality. Warning, I may use a little politically incorrect language from back before we forgot that when talking about the human race, "Man" included all people, male or female. I, as a human being, can say without fear of being contradicted, "I am man. I am human." Any other human being in existence can do the same thing. I am not you, and you are not I. I am not my father, nor am I my son. Regardless, I am still man, and so are you. Humanity, mankind, also consists of all men, all human beings, male and female. We are all mankind, the family of man. God even intended for us to live as family, as in Genesis 2:18 when He said, "It is not good for man to be alone." Of course it is not good, because we are meant to reflect His nature as family.

We are imperfect in our life as family here on earth, whether talking about one's immediate family, extended family or all of humanity. The Baltimore Catechism does state clearly our purpose in life, which is to know, love and serve God in this life and to be happy with Him in the next. Scripture speaks the truth in the first letter of John that, "We are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we do know that when Christ appears, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is." In the context of the Trinity, I find it impossible to believe that we will live as anything less than a perfect family. Does the Church believe that we shall be resurrected, just as Jesus Christ? Yes. Does the Church believe the Scripture that we shall be like Him? Yes, not just in the glorified, resurrected bodies we too will receive, but in the fact that we will live in perfect union with each other in the heavenly family, because we will live in perfect union with the Trinity. This is a bold proclamation, and I dare to say I want to be included in that. Any Catholic faithfully attending Mass should want the same and believe it is within reach, or else it would be foolish for the priest to pray during every consecration, "By the mystery of this water and wine, may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity." If I had more time for this blog entry, I'd go straight into commenting on Corpus Christi, but lunch is finished, and the housework is not. I cannot neglect my responsibilities to my immediate family. My God, the perfect family, bless you, my family of all humanity.

Get Up! Get Out There! Part I: Ascension to Pentecost

I've been meaning to get a blog post up for a few weeks now about the glorious liturgical feasts we've since celebrated/will celebrate, but with my crazy schedule, I've had more time to accumulate the thoughts about them and less to get them typed up and published. It's a good thing this isn't a job for me, or I'd be well past my deadline, but I digress. Many Catholics, Christians of other denominations, and even irreligious are easily excited about the amazing feasts of Christmas and Easter. For believers, who wouldn't be overjoyed at the celebration of Our Lord Jesus Christ's birth and Resurrection, respectively? I mean, He came down to earth, lived through vulnerability to the human experiences of hunger, thirst, heat, chill, temptation, and then, at the end of it all, suffered the death we deserved, because only One Who is God could worthily take away sin, but only a human being could suffer and die. By that human experience, we are shown we are not alone. By that death, our death is conquered. By that rising, we are restored to new life. Being no great theological scholar within the Church, I would still like to share some perspectives I've pieced together from homilies I've heard and theologians I respect greatly.

As we get later into the Easter Season, the focus shifts from the initial joy and wonder of Jesus rising from the dead. After weeks of our triumphant cry, "Christ is risen! Alleluia," we begin to get the sense that there is something more coming, hinting toward the Ascension on the fortieth day. What an amazing experience that must have been for the Apostles, as they witnessed Him returning, body and soul, to the Father in Heaven. What jubilation must have occurred in Heaven among the angels as Jesus returned from His mission, triumphant (thank you, Father Carroll for that perspective). When the Apostles' initial wonder faded, no doubt a certain degree of fear began to creep in. They saw great miracles before Jesus' death, yet scattered when things got tough. It's easy to stay brave when you can see an obvious sign of the Lord's presence with you. Yet, Jesus knew their hearts, and He had planned for it well in advance, promising them another Advocate. This Advocate arrived ten days later at Pentecost. What a great culmination of the Easter Season! And after that day, when the Apostles preached the Good News to the people and baptized 3,000 of them, they sat back and congratulated themselves on the great job they did, and that was the end of the story, right? Wrong!

After the arrival of the Holy Spirit, the Apostles fulfilled the command to the best of their abilities and beyond thanks to the grace God gave them to go out and preach the Gospel. We hear the story year after year, celebrate fifty days with glorious Alleluias constantly on our lips (thank you, Monsignor Ryan), and then what? What do we do with that message? Slip into Ordinary Time with just a vague memory of it? I think the liturgical colors may give us a little bit of an answer. Usually, throughout the major feasts of the Church, the vestments are white, yet Pentecost Sunday is red. Why? True, the Acts of the Apostles does tell us the Holy Spirit descended like tongues as of fire, and fire can be red, but at what other times does the priest wear red? Palm Sunday, Good Friday, feasts of certain martyrs, times when blood was shed, the liturgical color is red. I'm not qualified to say whether this was intentional or not, but Jesus promised us persecutions for His Name. He practically guaranteed the Apostles they would be called almost entirely, with the exception of John, to lay down their lives for Him, to shed their blood. We have the same call, to teach the truth of Christ, even at the cost of our own blood. Nowadays, we're often reduced to silence in the western world if someone so much as gives us a funny look for talking about Christ, especially on the moral issues. I've been called a religious extremist, a bigot, a misogynist and many other things for my faith in Jesus, and that's treated as a big thing. Seriously? Sticks and stones, folks. I'm a wimp of the Faith compared to the modern day martyrs in the Middle East and in godless regimes like China and North Korea. I ask for their prayers for me, so weak in my resolve here, because it will get worse than name calling and funny looks here, guaranteed.

There's much more to say, but while blogging is a great way to get a message out, I would be a hypocrite to spend so much time doing that while not attending to my duties to my family. The life of a disciple of Christ is one of service, and as a husband and father, I am bound to serve my family. After all, to give a taste of my next blog post, family is one of the greatest ways in which we begin to understand the nature of God. Until then, know that, in the words of St. Augustine, later reemphasized by Pope St. John Paul II, "We are an Easter people, and 'Alleluia' is our song." This does not cease to be true just because the Easter Season is over. Alleluia! Alleluia!