One week after Pentecost we celebrate a feast in honor of the Most Holy Trinity, the mystery that is at the center of our faith.  This mystery cannot be scientifically proven.  It is a mystery which required God to reveal to us.

God is one and God is three.  We tend to think of the three “Persons” of the Trinity as three individuals, like ourselves.  But while God is three, God is also one, and that’s the mystery which is beyond human comprehension.

The First Person of the Trinity, the Father and Creator, reveals Himself as “God-for-us.”  “God is love” (1 John 4: 8, 16) and it is the nature of love to share.  And so, God created a world into which He could pour out His love.  St. Paul asked, “If God is for us, who can be against us?”  (Romans 8:31).

And when humanity rejected God and His loving plan, He did not abandon or reject us.  God the Father sent His only begotten Son to share our human condition and to save us by His death and resurrection.  The Second Person of the Trinity is “God-with-us.”  St. Paul wrote: “He who did not spare his own Son but handed him over for us all, how will he not also give us everything else along with him? …Who will condemn? It is Christ who died, rather, was raised, who also is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. What will separate us from the love of Christ? Will anguish, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword? … No, in all these things we conquer overwhelmingly through him who loved us.  For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8: 32, 34-35, 37-39).

Moreover, God revealed that He is not only for us and with us but also “God-within-us.”  Again, St. Paul is the one who teaches us this revelation of God.  In 1 Corinthians 3: 16 he writes: “Do you not know that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?”

As the Most Holy Trinity, God is for us, with us, and within us.

This mystery has a very practical implication.  If we are made in the very image of God as the first book of the Bible tells us (Genesis 1: 27), then we are not created to be isolated individuals.  Instead, we are created to be in loving communion with God’s other sons and daughters, something that is made possible through the Holy Spirit who unites us to God and one another.

“Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, now and forever!”