Reflection on the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity

One of my favorite Peanuts comics shows Linus, Lucy and Charlie Brown looking at the clouds and reporting what they see.  Linus sees Beethoven, Lucy sees the Statue of Liberty and Charlie tells them he sees nothing.  Later, Lucy asked him if it was true that he saw nothing.  He said no it wasn’t true.  He just didn’t want to admit that all he saw was a kitty and a doggy.  That’s sort of how I feel as I try to talk about the Trinity.

I  first learned about the Trinity from the Baltimore Catechism, which we memorized word for word. When we were novices, Father Litzsinger came over from St. Rose Priory to teach us the Summa. We sat on straight chairs in the auditorium and he walked up and down on the stage illuminating and elucidating deep theological questions that had never crossed our minds.  I was utterly fascinated but I didn’t realize it was school and there would be a test.  Q. It can be said that the Holy Ghost is hypostatically generated by the love of the Father for the Son through a process called active spiration.  T or F. Hhmm. Mental note: Listen better and write this stuff down and learn it. 

Our readings today shed some wonderful light on the Trinity. In the first reading Moses descends the mountain carrying the tablets of the law. Something new.  While he knows that they can count on God to be gracious, kind and faithful, he also seems to know that he has his work cut out for him.  He asks God to come along in our company “because this is a stiff-necked people.”  And, just as he feared, it didn’t go well.  People usually don’t improve just because they know the law.

I heard somewhere that laws state the minimum requirements for being considered a civilized person.  Lawrence Kohlberg devised a taxonomy describing six levels of moral maturity and he placed law on the fourth level because, although it does add a touch of concern for the common good which is missing from the first three levels of fear, reward and compliance, it falls far short of being what we need to be doing to take care of one another and the earth.  All we have to do is turn on the TV to see that this is true.  In the violence and confusion going on now, the voices of  those who call for change struggle to be heard.  I also heard that the human race is frozen on the fourth level — still maintaining that law is our best and only solution to the problems we face.  Thank God there is a growing number of people who realize that we as human beings must climb those next two steps of responsibility and love if we are going to survive much less thrive. Recent current events have made growth at this level a critical necessity.

The second reading from Corinthians speaks of blessed relief.  In fact just reading it feels like pouring a can of WD 40 oil into the hot dry, gears of social strife pain and turmoil. “Mend your ways, encourage and agree with one another and the God of Love and peace will be with you.  Greet one another with a holy kiss.”  Living this way requires Divine assistance.

And that’s what we have in Jesus — Divine intervention. The Gospel tells us that God sent Jesus so that we who believe in him may not perish but may have eternal life — not only enlightenment but empowerment as well.  Eileen (Custy) said it well in her homily last week: “Through Jesus, God lifts us up and teaches us how to love better — everyone and everything.  Love serves, is compassionate and understanding.  Love seeks justice and does not condone power over others.”  

Social distancing has given me an opportunity to do some extra reading so here are a couple of things I found  that seem to throw some light on the topic of coming to a deeper understanding of who Jesus really is.

John Shelby Spong theorizes that Christianity will need a new template if it is to be vital in today’s world.  Siri told me that a template is a pattern of regularity containing elements which repeat in a predictable manner. Spong postulates that the critical issues of our times have laid bare deeper spiritual pain, hunger and need than current modes of religious thought and practice are able to serve or accommodate. It was startling when I first read it but the more I think about it in the context of our present situation, the more I wonder if there would not be some data to support it.

Richard Rohr seems to be thinking somewhat along those same lines with his latest book The Universal Christ.  In it, he proposes that Jesus is ready to give us much more than we have ever asked for or dreamed of asking for.  He tells us that Jesus is more about waking up than cleaning up. While we  have been focused  on who does or does not meet the requirements for moral behavior and religious belief, Jesus himself refused to enforce or even bother about what he considered to be secondary issues like Sabbath rules and rituals and membership requirements.  Everybody is in to start with.  Our first task is to accept that fact.

Rohr proposes that we will need to change our focus from the Jesus of history to the Christ of faith — the post-Pentecostal Christ. “Jesus as the Eternal Christ is the symbolic superconductor of Divine Energy into this world and switching to that divine reality could change everything we see, hope for and  believe.”  How? As yeast leavens bread … as light permeates darkness. One final note. The word “template” suggests the word “contemplation.”  Thomas Keating calls contemplation “Divine Therapy” and that sounds to me like exactly what we need right now, so maybe a good place for me to start would be the words of the psalmist, “Be still and know that I am God.“