John Paul Sartre was a French existentialist and an atheist, and he wrote a book called
Nausea, and in it he says, we are thrown into the world and find ourselves with an essential
sickness of soul and a lonely heart. That's the philosophy of atheism, and it ends in despair.
If there's no God, there's no hope. If there's no faith, there's no hope.
And essentially, that's the life of the unredeemed.
Another theory on God is called deism.
And deism believes in a supreme being.
They believe that God kind of created the world a long time ago
and wound it up like a clock and then just let it run out.
So believing in God is not enough.
This deists believe in a distant God,
a God who is indifferent to the world, to humanity.
Kind of like a deadbeat dad
who doesn't do anything to help his children.
Now, not only do we believe in God,
but we believe in a trinity of persons.
We believe there is a fatherhood which is perfect.
Maybe there's a story that kind of illustrates that a little bit.
It's called the Father's Heart.
So it's everybody first.
A moment of eerie silence, a low rumble,
and then the ground began to shake.
Less than four minutes later, over 30,000 people were dead
from an 8.2 earthquake that rocked
and nearly flattened Armenia in 1989.
In the muddled chaos, a distressed father
who had dropped off his son at school earlier that day
could not stop thinking about the promise he had made to his son.
No matter what happens, Armin,
I'll always be there for you.
When he reached the site where his son's school had been,
he saw only a pile of rubble.
With nothing but his bare hands, he started digging.
12 hours, 18 hours, 24 hours, 36 hours,
and finally, at the 38th hour,
he heard a muffled groan.
Armin.
And from the darkness came a slight,
shaking voice.
Papa.
Armin turned to his classmates and said,
See, I told you my father wouldn't forget us.
Like we say, we do believe in a fatherhood that is perfect.
And when we celebrate the Trinity,
we're really looking at the fatherhood of God.
Last week, we celebrated the Holy Spirit, Pentecost.
Next week, Corpus Christi, the second person of the Trinity.
But today, the focus is on God and his fatherhood.
They say, at creation,
God made a decision not to be a self-contained unit.
God wanted to share his happiness with others.
And even at creation, in Genesis, it says,
It is not good for the man to be alone.
Okay?
And,
they say that the basic unit of society
is not the individual, but the family.
In a sense, it's the family that makes us in the image of God.
The family is, it's the relationship between persons.
God is a trinity of persons, like G.K. Chesterton says
that people understand God is love, but when it comes
to saying God is a trinity of persons, it confounds people.
But G.K. Chesterton says it's two ways of saying the same thing.
The trinity is a lover, a beloved, and love itself.
Lover, beloved, and the love they share.
St. Augustine said, lover, beloved, and love itself.
Fulton Sheen says, the father looks at the son, the son looks
at the father, and they sigh, and that's the Holy Spirit.
Proceeds from the love
between the father and the son.
St. Bernard's calls, says, embracer,
embraced, and the embrace.
Those are the three persons of the trinity.
And, like we say, Adam found his completion in Eve.
It is not good for the man to be alone.
Okay? So, in the family, we find completion.
And, all of humanity finds its completion in God,
in that relationship with God.
That's our fulfillment, ultimately.
So, like we say, just as God is not a solitary being,
God is a being for others, not for himself.
One person says, the trinity is a dance.
It's a sort of dance, because it's a relationship.
And, they say, we are most,
ourselves, when we are most like God,
when we are being for others.
Like, they say that the word family is an acronym.
Each letter represents a word.
And, it's forget about me, I love you.
That's kind of the trinity idea.
That the father loves the son, the son loves the father,
and the love between the father and the son is the Holy Spirit.
In marriage, they say that,
um,
when a man and a woman get married,
they say the love between them is so much, so real,
nine months later, you have to give it a name.
So, just as in the trinity,
um, it's a person, the love between the father and the son.
So, it is in the family.
If God isn't an individual, then there's no one to love.
So, God is not a lone ranger, but, as we say, a trinity of persons.
So, God is not a lone ranger, but, as we say, a trinity of persons.
So, God is not a lone ranger, but, as we say, a trinity of persons.
So, God is not a lone ranger, but, as we say, a trinity of persons.
An, and so, we find our completion when we live
in that image of God.
Imaging
God's
being for others.
To understand the family is the key to understanding the trinity.
Like we say, all of humanity finds its completion in God,
just as Adam found his completion in Eve.
And Adam and Eve, together, found their completion in God.
There's an expression, they say,
say, that love is imperfect, which is not returned.
The love in the Trinity is perfect because it's returned.
The Holy Spirit is the love between the Father and the Son.
And in today's Gospel, it says,
God so loved the world that he sent his only Son.
So God's love reached out to humanity.
God sent his Son as a being for us,
to bring us back to God,
to bring us back to the embrace of the Trinity.
And like we say, that love is imperfect, which is not returned.
Well, the ball is kind of in our court.
We have to return that love that he has revealed to us in Jesus Christ.
Second Vatican Council said,
we find ourselves through a sincere gift of ourselves.
We find ourselves through a sincere gift of ourselves.
Through love of others, we find our identity.
But through love of God, we also find our full identity.
We become fully aware of who we are.
St. Augustine called the Trinity,
lover, beloved, and love itself.
And ultimately, that's the communion that we want to enter more fully into.
Thank you.
To that life of the Trinity.
The universe naturally reveals God through creation.
God the Father initiated the world through creation.
The Trinity initiated redemption by the incarnation,
redemption of the world.
And again, God initiating love.
That's the role of fatherhood.
Father initiates life.
Father initiates love.
And our vocation is to return the love of the Father
through the Son in the Holy Spirit.
So we pray that this feast of the Holy Trinity will help us to grow
in knowledge and love of the Trinity.
They say all progress in the spiritual life is progress
in knowledge and love of the Trinity.
Okay. So may we understand the mystery more clearly
and live more gently.
And we pray so generously that that gift of self that God invites us to.
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