June 13-14: Preparing to Celebrate Sunday's Mass

In the fifth-century, St. Augustine wrote, “Who can understand the Trinity? Rare are the persons who, when they speak of it, also know what they are saying….” Then, with all due qualifications and apologies, he suggests a way that might throw a little light on it! “Look at yourself,” he says. “You see that you exist and that you have a mind and a will. These are three dimensions of your being, and yet you are one. You are a kind of trinity: three in one and one in three.”

St. Augustine added, “Who can in any way express the Trinity plainly? Who can in any way rashly make a pronouncement about it without using such an image?” It is only an image, yes, but it has this advantage: that it is taken from personal life, and not from mathematics. After all, sometimes people have seen the mystery of the Trinity as a piece of impossible mathematics in which 1 x 3 is still 1.

St. John, like St. Augustine, looked at personal life for analogies of the Trinity. He wrote, "Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.” (1 John 4, 8). This is a profoundly challenging statement. If we do not live in love, we do not know God. A little further on, St. John wrote, “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.” (1 John 4, 16). We may be among the most learned theologians in the world, we may have hundreds of ideas for the betterment of the Church and society, but if we are not living in love, our efforts are in some strange way empty.

We invite you to pray this prayer before coming to Mass this weekend: “O Lord our God, your name is veiled in mystery, and yet we dare to call you our loving Father. Your Son was begotten before all ages, and yet is born among us in time. Your Holy Spirit fills the whole of creation, and yet is poured forth now into our hearts. Because you have made us, loved us, and called us by name, draw us more deeply into your divine life, that we may glorify you rightly through your Son, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever. Amen.”