Sunday Reflection with Fr Robin Gibbons Trinity Sunday

Detail of Trinity in Dark Tones (Genesis 18) by Alek Rapoport. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

12 June 2022

What kind of mystery is the Trinity, that Triune God we honour with prayer and reverence? The older I get, the less I feel like theologising and interpreting dogma and doctrine, but rather the more I want simply to do as the Cherubic Hymn in our Byzantine Liturgy puts it:

"Let us, who mystically represent the cherubim and sing the thrice-holy hymn to the life-giving trinity, lay aside all worldly cares, that we may receive the King of all, invisibly escorted by the angelic hosts. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia."

This is not opting out of sharing my reflection on the Holy One with you all, but a desire to move away from the aridity of any doctrinal language and enter into another encounter where relationship is transmitted through action, poetry, music and rite, where the heart is engaged as much as the mind and where the language of the soul speaks mightily.

In all my own seeking, and I am not yet finished my earthly journey, I can honestly say that early call I understood and that I found explained so directly and simply in the Rule of Saint Benedict and which I embraced at 18 is still there, of course it has been enriched and deepened by my immersion and call both to ecumenical service but also to embrace that part of the Catholic Church which belongs to the East. This phrase from Benedict's Prologue seems to me to answer the question I set myself, 'what do you seek, who is it that you look for?' 'What can be sweeter to us, dear friends, than this voice of the Lord inviting us? Behold, in His loving kindness the Lord shows us the way of life.'

So in a very personal way Trinity Sunday is not a dogma Sunday, not a time to tease out the dynamics of the Holy in an intellectual exercise, instead, it is as our psalm puts it, a time to praise, relax and enter into the exercise of God who waits for us to come! Our psalm today is my kind of psalm:

'O Lord, our God, how wonderful your name in all the earth!
When I behold your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars which you set in place -
What are mortals that you should be mindful of them,
or the son of man that you should care for him?' (Ps 8: 4,5)

Here we are taken into praise and wonder, moved beyond our very limited horizons and pushed into a very uncomfortable place, that of the lover telling love to the beloved, but in this case it is the Most High telling every one of us, and yes every living creature, that we are loved, special and important. Faced with the mystery and immensity of the Hidden One, all we can do is wonder and question. 'Where are You, who are You, how do I find You? '

We can glimpse in the Incarnation, life, passion, death resurrection and ascension of Christ our trajectory, He the son of the `Unseen Creator pulls us with him in that journey of humility, with Him and through Him our earth and its life suddenly belong in a pattern and loving journey of life. Blowing, thrusting, hidden yet so very present we grasp She who is Spirit, that dynamism of the All Holy One who cannot be pinned down, who is not bounded by time as the Christ is. This Spirit invisible yet so very real, is that love we need, that hope we want, that faith we try to live, and that self same Spirit opens the doors of perception to us. This is certainly what our readings hint at !

Then hesitant now, I sense as Gerontius sensed in Newman's poem, something more, that Invisible Light which instinctively I know as home, love, parent, lover, the One who wants me above all else, but who I struggle to find and yet know instinctively, these thoughts are found in the words of the angel to the soul:

'O happy, suffering soul! For it is safe,
Consumed, yet quicken'd, by the glance of God'.

There I shall leave you this Trinity Sunday, for each one of us makes a common journey into a relationship with the Triune God. Look around you for those glimpses of the glance of God, for in our everyday life, today, tomorrow, the Trinity is calling us to join them!

Lectio

Jn 16:12-15

Jesus said to his disciples:
"I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now.
But when he comes, the Spirit of truth,
he will guide you to all truth.
He will not speak on his own,
but he will speak what he hears,
and will declare to you the things that are coming.
He will glorify me,
because he will take from what is mine and declare it to you.
Everything that the Father has is mine;
for this reason I told you that he will take from what is mine
and declare it to you."

"Love of God is not something that can be taught. We did not learn from someone else how to rejoice in light or want to live, or to love our parents or guardians. It is the same - perhaps even more so - with our love for God: it does not come by another's teaching."
- St Basil the Great

"Abyss calls to abyss. It is there in the very depths that the divine impact takes place, where the abyss of our nothingness encounters the Abyss of mercy, the immensity of the all of God. There we will find the strength to die to ourselves and, losing all vestige of self, we will be changed into love."
- Elizabeth of the Trinity, Elizabeth of the Trinity THE COMPLETE WORKS, I have found GOD, Vol 1