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This Sunday is the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity. On this liturgical feast several years ago, at the Mass I attended the priest announced after the Gospel, ?Since we can?t understand the Holy Trinity there?s no use giving a homily, so we?ll skip it today.?

?Skip it!?? I wanted to cry out from my pew. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is not just a mind puzzle. The Trinity is our home. Our greatest saints and doctors of the Church have spent hundreds of years hammering out how to speak authentically about the deepest mysteries of God?s life, and we?re just going to skip it?

It is true, most of us have a ?shamrock-level? appreciation of the Trinity. We were taught as kids that there are three Persons in one God, just as there are three leaves in a shamrock. The Trinity. That?s often where our exploration of this mystery of God ends. We?re busy. We have little time for reflection on the depths of God. We might think, what day to day practical purpose would it serve anyway?

If you look at the banner at the top of this newsletter you can see a famous depiction of the Trinity in Andre Rublev?s sixteenth-century icon The Holy Trinity. The Father is to the left. The Son is in the center, with his head bowed slightly. His two visible fingers represent his two natures?divine and human. The Spirit, to the right, also with head slightly bowed, wears green?the color of life. The Spirit is sometimes called the life-giver. Both Son and Spirit are looking toward the Father, who is their origin.?Relationship. The name of the Trinity is imprinted upon each of us and upon all that exists, for everything, down to the last particle, is in relation to something or someone else. God is relationship.

From the example of the dance of love in the Trinity, here are six strategies for deepening your relationships:

1. Every time we respect another person or we reverence the sacredness and integrity of creation, we are living in relationship. We are living as God lives: in love.
2. Whenever we give ourselves to another in service or care, we are living in a relationship modeled on God-Love.
3. When we love, yet respect another?s freedom, we are loving the way the Persons of the Trinity love each other, and the way they love us.
4. Whenever we receive another?s compassion and ministry, we are living in a relationship with the humility and surrender of the Son.
5. When we know how to give and how to receive love, we live within ourselves the dynamic of love present in God.
6. When we deepen and respect relationships, we are allowing God?s Loving Kindness to be imprinted ever more deeply on the world, on our family and friends, on our souls.

The world, one day, will have impressed on it unmistakably the character of divine love through our day to day loving.

So Happy Feast Day and happy loving!

Sr. Kathryn James Hermes, fsp
Author of Beginning Contemplative Prayer

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