Lost in Love: The Trinity and the Human Person

Eternal Trinity... mystery deep as the sea, You could give me no greater gift than the gift of Yourself. For You are a fire ever burning and never consumed, which itself consumes all the selfish love that fills my being... - Saint Catherine of Siena I always get a little annoyed when a priest or deacon gets skittish about preaching on the Trinity, and jokes about how confusing the Trinity is, saying things like "When I'm through preaching on the Trinity, you'll probably be more confused than you are now!" And everyone sort of chuckles in that soft church laugh/chuckle kind of way. Then we buck up for a homily that anesthetizes more than it obfuscates (oh man would my old English teacher be proud of me for that line!) But is the Trinity some sort of Divine Puzzle? Did God reveal Himself to us as some sort of enigmatic algebraic equation that only Einsteins could figure out? Or is it perhaps that our approach, our trying to "grasp" this 1 + 1 + 1 = 1 formula is all wrong? HUSH IN THE PRESENCE OF THIS MYSTERY The Trinity is not a puzzle, but Persons. Not a problem to be solved but a Mystery of Love in Whom by grace we can swim! "Thanks to the Holy Spirit, who helps us to understand the words of Jesus and guides us into all the truth, believers can know, so to speak, the intimacy of God himself, discovering that he is not infinite solitude, but communion of light and love, life given and received in an eternal dialogue between the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit - lover, beloved and love, to recall St. Augustine." - Pope Benedict XVI (Angelus, June 11, 2006, www.Zenit.org) God peeled back the blue sky and sent the Spirit to hover over His Son in the waters of the Jordan and spoke from up above to welcome us into this Great Mystery of Who God Is. And the image of Three Persons as One Communion of Love is not far from us, or foreign to our minds. It's stamped right in our bodies, in the love of husband and wife, and in the fruit that proceeds from the man and wife in the beauty and overflowing love of New Life! Allow me to quote at length from the MAN: "For him who has faith, the whole universe speaks of God one and triune. From interstellar space to microscopic particles, all that exists refers to a being who communicates himself in the multiplicity and variety of the elements, as in an immense symphony. All beings are ordered according to a harmonic dynamism, which we can call, analogically, "love." But only in the human person, free and rational, this dynamism becomes spiritual, a responsible love, as response to God and to one's neighbor in a sincere gift of self. In this love the human being finds his truth and happiness." YES!! "Among the different analogies of the ineffable mystery of God one and triune, which believers have the capacity to perceive, I would like to mention the family. It is called to be a community of love and life, in which differences must come together to become a "parable of communion."' - Pope Benedict Great food for thought in these days of sexual confusion, marital conflict, divorce and fracture. Let's remember who we are, and that we are made for Communion. A Communion with the very Triune, Familial Heart of the Living God, Who is Love. In giving ourselves, body and soul, in our own masculinity and femininity to this Mystery, we will truly find ourselves!