The intimate mystery

By F. Luis Casasus, General Superior of idente missionaries
Commentary on the Sunday Gospel of 11-6-2017, The Most Holy Trinity Solemnity (Book of Exodus 34:4b-6.8-9; 2 Corinthians 13:11-13; Saint John 3:16-18).

Please, if you recently raised your voice against your brother or you think that he will never change, then read no further. Why? Elementary religious psychology teaches us that these are the two signs opposed to the Washing of the feet, the strongest signal of our openness to the action of the Most Holy Trinity.

The Swiss priest and brilliant theologian Maurice Zundel (1897-1975) wrote:

No one can be offended, no one can feel diminished if he learns that God, understood as a Presence interior to ourselves and always already there, that this God is God because he posseses nothing. No one can be offended by a God on his knees, by a God who proposes himself whithout ever imposing himself. The Trinity revealed by Jesus Christ gives us the understanding of the gesture of the Washing of the feet. If Jesus is on his knees, if He introduces a new scale of values in the world, he bases it precisely on the heart of the Trinity.

In the full consciousness of who He was, He takes off his outer clothing and wraps a towel around him and washes the disciples’ feet.

And what does that say to us? It says that the impulse to serve lies at the very heart of the Trinity. God the Father serving the Son; the Son serving the Father. And it is traced right back to the Trinity itself. Peter says, You are going to wash my feet? Never! And Jesus reminds him, What I do now you may not understand, but you will understand hereafter. How true that was; because it is John who makes that understood for us: Jesus was demonstrating in the full consciousness of His deity: I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet.

Today’s second reading is telling us to rejoice, because we can share in the lifestyle of the Trinity, we can encourage one another, agree with one another, live in peace.

What is the difference between the persons who create victims with their intemperance, their lack of control and those who are really patient, quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger (James 1:19)? It is not a psychological factor or a special talent; it simply consists in asking for this patience every morning in my silent prayer.

Does it sound to you a bit too simplistic? Or like a cliché? Then you probably think you are much stronger than the psalmist:

In the morning, o Lord, hear my voice. In the morning I lay my needs in front of you, and I wait (Psalm 5:3).

It is not mere curiosity in trying to pry into the personal life of God. With the Trinity, what is most important is not to ruminate on the mystery, but to imitate this spirit of service of the Trinity. In fact, Saint Augustine affirms that one does not enter into the truth if not through charity.

When one is on the shore of a lake or, and wishes to know what is on the other side, what is most important is not to sharpen one’s sight and try to scan the horizon, but to get into the boat that takes one to that shore. Mystery indeed! Fortunately though, we can love someone we don’t fully understand. With a healthy dose of humor, he American Catholic writer, Flannery O’Connor, once wrote to a friend, I love a great number of people, but I understand none of them.

Concretely, this life of love and fellowship must be lived out in the Christian community and in our daily lives, as the second reading tells us. Hence, St Paul tells us that if we want to live the life of the Trinity, then we must grow to be perfect by living in peace and unity with each other; with simple signs, like a kiss or saying thank you (Don’t tell me you always remember this…!).

But our father Founder taught us that the Most Holy Trinity goes beyond the purification and transformation of our souls. What is the final purpose of love? What is the goal of anyone who loves? The final goal of love is union, a complete union between the one lover and the one loved. That is why already in the Old Testament, in the Canticle of Canticles the marital embrace of husband and wife is the divinely revealed symbol of the union between a loving Creator and the world, especially man whom he loves. This is the same reason why Christ more than once speaks of the kingdom of heaven as a marriage feast. What is the final goal and purpose of anyone who loves? It is to be united with the one whom we love.

This goal is clearly stated by Jesus as an invitation or rather a commandment, a joint venture called Transverberative Union: Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect (Mt 5:48). We all have experience, although slight or incipient, of this Union, because of the Presence of the divine persons in our spirit. The form of this (hopefully continuous) experience is a compenetration, a mutual rapprochement that goes beyond the imitation of some traits of personality. Some manifestations of this compenetration, formally called Inspiration:

• • I feel I managed to bring joy to God with my faithfulness, in spite of my mediocrity. In particular, when I have been able to forgive, with the help of the grace.
  • Now I see more clearly that nothing could satisfy me in this world but the things and the realities of God, his plans and his mercy. I feel attracted by Him…at least “by exclusion”. As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God. (Ps 42:1)
  • I realize that glorifying God is not confined to doing good but also in suffering for love and truth as well. Therefore, in all modesty, I have been able to imitate Jesus in some moments of contrariety, tensions and misunderstandings. Christ did it in the most sublime way: At the time he was betrayed and entered willingly into his Passion, he took bread and, giving thanks, broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying: Take this, all of you, and eat of it, for this is my body, which will be given up for you.

Note that in these experiences the disciple is not merely passive, but undertakes some concrete actions, initiatives that change his life deeply, in a potentially irreversible way. This is more than the occasional practice or experience of a virtue.

The peak moments of this Inspiration are a true Dialogue with the divine persons. Not a mere exchange of words, but a response in form of a push, a Motus, a smooth motion as an answer to my intentions.

Christian hope is to live here and now the eternal life under the regime of faith: I firmly believe that the Most Holy Trinity is in my spirit, that is not out there, in a different world, but in my world, that is my spirit; and with the Most Holy Trinity, naturally, all the saints, the communion of all the saints. I believe in this and in what this means, and this prompts me to live it through (Fernando Rielo, NOV 1, 1972).

The divine indwelling, the sanctifying presence of the divine persons, gives us a capacity to holiness that is impossible outside the Christian world. By now we have lived long enough with ourselves to know how little we can do alone; in Christ’s words, without me you can do nothing. Many of us, during times of difficulty or opposition, lose our original goal and succumb to pressure. At other times, we are carried away by the temptations of life that we become complacent in our mission (Instinct for Happiness). We have many goodwill people (especially young priests) who initiate noble projects but never persevere long enough to see them through. We have omnipotence at our disposal, not just near us, around us, but in the profoundest sense of the word, within us.

This is important. The peace and unity we all are longing for can only be founded on truth. And the Presence of the Trinity in us represents the opportunity to embrace the truth, not just to understand it.

For example, we may profess the truth that the meek inherit the earth, but in reality we say to our self, If I don’t exert myself over others, I am going to be left behind. If someone asks us whether we believe that love should be the most dominant force in the world, we would probably say, yes. But in reality we might believe that power is the deciding factor. We might be led to believe that the commandment to love one another means loving those who lovable or think or act the way we do. Then we come face to face with Jesus teaching to love our enemies. I don’t know about you, but I don’t find it particularly easy or comfortable to love my enemies. But as persons of faith, that is what we are pushed to do.

The divine indwelling should motivate us to respond to the constant “forms of attraction”, illuminations of mind and thrusts of the will which the Holy Trinity, dwelling in our souls is every moment giving us.

In a nutshell and simplifying a lot, we can say that the Father makes us know his plans (through the dreams and the suffering of our neighbors), Jesus teaches us with his example how to carry them forward and the Holy Spirit sets signs in our path to console us and give us insight.

A story is told of a missionary in a remote place, who on his home-leave, came across a beautiful sundial. He thought to himself, That sundial would be ideal for my villagers in the mission. I could use it to teach them to tell the time of the day. The missionary bought the sundial, crated it and took it along when he returned to his mission. When the village chief saw it, he insisted that it be set up in the center of the village. The villagers were thrilled with the sundial. They had never seen something so beautiful in their lives. They were even more thrilled when they learned how it worked. The missionary was delighted by everyone’s response to his sundial. He was totally unprepared for what happened a few days later. The people of the village got together and built a roof over the sundial to protect it from the rain and the sun!

The sundial is a lot like the Holy Trinity, and we Christians are a lot like the villagers in the story. The most beautiful revelation of our faith is the teaching about the Holy Trinity, namely, the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit. But instead of putting the teaching to work in our daily lives, we have built a roof over it, just as the villagers did over their sundial. For many of us the Trinity seems of little practical value, when it comes to our daily lives. We treat it more like an ornament of our faith.

We have to realize that the desire to proclaim the Gospel is not so much a question of proselytism, of making converts, but to share the joy of intimacy with the Father through the Son in the Spirit. In the midst of our tight schedules and our contemporary hyperactive rhythm of life, we need to dedicate some minutes throughout the day to be more aware of the gifts we receive…from within.