Reading Francis

So what?

Last Sunday was the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity for Catholics – basically there’s a lineup of deep-topic feast days on Sundays from Ascension to Pentecost to Trinity Sunday to Corpus Christi that celebrate different important but hard to grasp theological concepts. If you are the type that thinks that faith is like school, where you have to learn a bunch of concepts and pass a test (which it is not, to be clear), this stretch is like a tough midterm. For Americans, the fact that Trinity Sunday aligns with Father’s Day this year is kind of unfortunate; I saw a lot of families at Mass who aren’t always there, and hearing a homilist try to explain the Trinity isn’t necessarily the best way to lure them back next week.

I listen to a bunch of homilies via podcast and what-not every Sunday, and this week, almost all of them focused on how people get it wrong when trying to understand the nature of the Trinity. The preachers are correct, of course, because it wouldn’t be called a mystery by the Church if it were easy to understand, but I found myself asking a not-very-profound question: 

“So what?”

If I don’t really get how God can be one God in three persons, what does it matter? 

I think the answer(s) to that question might make a more relevant message than a deep dive on the history of trinitarian heresies.

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Have you ever mistaken someone’s name? Like, called somebody “Ted” for an entire conversation before they finally break down and tell you it’s “Tom”? Or, maybe worse yet, see someone that you think is Sally from work, and after excitedly talking to her about Sally-from-work topics, you realize that it’s not her at all; it’s Jackie from the gym who is kinda annoying? Or, hypothetically, you call your sister by another sister’s name or your wife by your daughter’s name or some crazy thing like that? Nobody does that, right?

I can verify that, if you burn yourself with these mistakes enough times, you’ll learn never to call anyone by name, ever again. Former President George W. Bush used to give everyone dippy nicknames so he didn’t have to remember their real names, and I’m re-evaluating how wise he was with each passing day. Hey, Buddy.

Maybe one answer to “So what?” is that, if God is supposed to be the center of your life and deepest love, it’s worth getting God’s identity right. Or at least, not wrong. (I may start praying “In the name of the Stretch and the Buddy and the Rockstar,” just to be on the safe side.)

More seriously, I think the better answer to “So what?” is the idea that, if we’re made in God’s image, who God is says something about who we are.  

I John 4 is not one of the readings in the Mass for Holy Trinity Sunday, but a lot of theologians think it’s got the key to (somewhat) understanding the Trinity: God is love. Not “God is loving.” God IS love. And since love requires a lover, a beloved, and the love between them, a subject, object and verb, the Trinity is a way of capturing what it means for God to be love.

We are not love. (At least, I’m not.) But maybe we can grow into those roles of lover and beloved a little bit each day. And since love is a word that gets parsed a lot of different ways, here are four things the Trinity tells us about what that divine love looks like in action.

Love is creative. Love is sacrificial. Love is sustaining. Love is shared.

We profess a God who creates out of love, and we can be creative as well. In Catholic circles, this tends to be conflated with being procreative, and that’s certainly an element of our creativity. But so is art. So is innovation. So is work, at its best. So is the generativity of helping the next generation, even if they aren’t our particular kids we’re helping. Love is creative in lots of ways, and so we can be, too.

We profess a God who sacrifices – by suffering insult and offering mercy, by becoming one of us just to be close to us, by suffering death. We have the invitation to do the same – a few of us literally (who we call martyrs), and the rest of us in more limited ways. I don’t know a love that doesn’t eventually include some sort of suffering, because love requires vulnerability and vulnerability risks pain and loss. The life of a Christian is a continual invitation to de-center ourselves and let go of what we want in favor of what others need. Whether it’s forgiving someone who did you wrong or staying up with a sick kid or ditching your plans in order to help a friend in a pinch, love sacrifices in lots of ways, and so, too, can we.

The Gospel for Trinity Sunday is John 16, from Jesus’s Last Supper Discourse, when He says (paraphrasing) “You guys can’t understand all this yet, but don’t worry. When I’m gone, the Holy Spirit will help you get there.” Love isn’t one and done, it’s a daily, moment-by-moment classroom that doesn’t shirk from the slowness of the process. Paul was right in I Corinthians 13 that love is patient, but it’s more than the patience of waiting on hold to talk to the next available agent. It’s the patience of one who sticks it out, through the hard days when it seems like nothing is going right and everyone else is giving up, because love knows that progress sometimes looks like that. Love sustains when everything else fails, and we may get a chance to play that role, too.

Above all, love is shared. This may be the most self-evident point, but in today’s era of self-isolation it may also be the hardest. We are invited to share our lives rather than wall them up, because love shares, too.

So what? So maybe we could embrace those who have sparked our creativity, those who have sacrificed for us, those who have sustained us in bleak times, those who share themselves with us. They are mirroring what we are all called to be, and the Trinity as well, even if they don’t understand it any better than we do.