Showing posts with label Trinity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Trinity. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

YOLO!


The Mystery of Mary is the mystery of the Trinity. Perhaps this country has not reached the understanding of the Triune God – understanding in Faith for who can understand the Trinity.
But we know, or should know, that from eternity, She was present in the mind of God, the Holy Spirit overshadowed Her; the second Person of the Trinity was born from Her.

To us of the Eastern spirituality She is so depicted on many icons with the Child in Her heart. The Holy Spirit hovered over Her and the hands of the Father blessed Her – Our Lady of the Trinity.

I am not a theologian, which is just as well, for I don’t know if theologians weep. I guess they do… But I sense some incredible, ineffable mystery approaching my soul and my soul entering into that mystery by Faith and being absorbed by it!

I enter into that mystery through a finely woven gate that I call Mary. I walk through that gate to the Way. The Way who is Her Son; for Jesus said: “I am the Way, the Truth and the Light”. And I walk into the arms of my Father; our Father, your Father and mine, everyone’s Father since His Son died to make all men brothers. To help me to walk the way of Jesus I have the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, who went to overshadow Mary, Her Spouse.

I am writing about things that I do not understand, but I sense in Faith. And why shouldn’t I? For I love Mary the Mother of God, the Bogoroditza whom all Russians love and who is present at their baptism, who walks with them through all their life and greets them when they come to the heaven which is the Triune God.

Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Restoration, October 1972

Reflection – Well, Catherine is taking us about as deep as anyone can take us into the mystery of Mary, going about as far as human words can go. Some may think she goes a bit too far here: ‘the mystery of Mary is the mystery of the Trinity’? What does that mean? Mary is not God, and God exists from all eternity while Mary, beloved as she is, is a creature in time. What gives here? Is Catherine getting carried away on a sweep of emotion, right over the edge of heresy and Mariolatry?

Well, I don’t think so. Of course God is God and Mary is His creature, in that respect no different from the rest of us. What Catherine means by saying that the mystery of Mary and the Trinity are one is that the mystery of God cannot be understood fully until we see his designs, his creative and redemptive will, fully expressed in his creation. God exists apart from His creation, but we who are creatures cannot understand God except through how we see Him revealed in creation.

And God is only revealed in his creation partially and imperfectly, as in the lower creation of inanimate objects and irrational living creatures, or his creative will and love is deeply distorted, as in sinful human beings. Only in Mary who is conceived immaculately, who is utterly free of the distortion of our humanity that we all labor under, and who in her unmarred freedom freely chose to cooperate at each stage with God’s plan, do we see the full picture of what the mind and heart of God is towards us.

And this heart and mind of God towards us is for us to share in his glory by receiving the fullness of Who He Is into our being. Mary does this in the flesh in a unique way for the world, becoming an integral and necessary part of the plan of God for the whole cosmos. We are not, of course, called to that unique participation, but nonetheless God made us to be part of his cosmic plan. Our way into it is to echo Mary’s fiat – let it be done to me according to your will. And then to give our flesh—our whole humanity—to the work of God in whatever way His Spirit leads us.

And this is the path to glory. More and more I find myself meditating on Mary as Queen of heaven and earth. We all desire a full, rich life. ‘YOLO’ is the cry of youth today—you only live once, so cram as much life into life as you can. But Mary shows us here that the ‘long game’ is actually the wiser and ultimately richer and more vibrantly alive choice. You only live once, but that one life can actually go on forever, and just get better and more rich and more exciting and glorious and fun with each passing year, each passing aeon.

These are divine mysteries, and indeed The Divine Mystery. But Mary holds the key to that mystery, and her whole ministry in our lives is to open it up for us and usher us through into the heart of Her Son and Her Father, in union and concert with the work of the Spirit in our lives. And that, my friends, is the fundamental Mariology of the Church.

Friday, February 1, 2013

Food and Drink, Foundation and Goal

The fact that Luke places the Our Father in the context of Jesus’ own praying is significant. Jesus thereby involves us in his own prayer; he leads us into the interior dialogue of triune love; he draws our human hardships deep into God’s heart, as it were. This also means, however, that the words of the Our Father are signposts to interior prayer, they provide a basic direction for our being, and they aim to configure us to the image of the Son. The meaning of the Our Father goes much further than the mere provision of a prayer text. It aims to form our being, to train us in the inner attitude of Jesus.

This has two different implications for our interpretation of the Our Father. First of all, it is important to listen as accurately as possible to Jesus’ words as transmitted to us in Scripture. We must strive to recognize the thoughts Jesus wished to pass on to us in these words. But we must also keep in mind that the Our Father originates from his own praying, from the Son’s dialogue with the Father. This means that it reaches down into depths far beyond the words. It embraces the whole compass of man’s being in all ages and can therefore never be fully fathomed by a purely historical exegesis, however important this may be.
Jesus of Nazareth 1, 132-3

Reflection – Well, this is certainly a mouthful to ponder, perhaps not just for a day, but for a life. I don’t know about you, but I can certainly rattle off the Our Father, in Mass, in the Office, in the rosary, with hardly a thought about any of it. Ourfatherwhoartinheavenhallowedbethyname… Inattention, habit, spiritual shallowness can all make of it an exercise with seemingly little value. So it’s good to read things like this, that remind us of just how deep this prayer is, just what depths of God it contains, just how far into the mystery of God it takes us, if we consent to be taken.

Our Father—perhaps the first two words alone are enough to ponder on. That God is Father, that the ultimate reality is not some nebulous ‘energy’ or some unfathomable unreachable mystery. He is Father—there is a relationship, a possibility of intimacy. There is provision and protection, care and concern, a rushing out of the house to embrace the son in love (cf. Luke 15). Everything good that we can say about the word ‘father’, all that we hope for and desire and perhaps experienced (or, sadly, maybe not) from our earthly fathers, all of this is who God tells us He is in a surpassing way.

But there’s more yet. God is Father in that our whole being comes from Him. He fashions us forth and shapes us into true sons and daughters, bearing his name and image. Our whole self and all it means is from Him and towards Him. God is Father… we can meditate on this one word for months without moving an inch further in the prayer.

He is also ‘our’ Father. And this too has great significance. I am not separated from you. We are not mere atoms bumping up against each other in the cosmic soup. I have a Father and you have a Father and He is the same Father of us both. So you are my brother, my sister. He is ours, and so this whole life of ‘from the Father/towards the Father’ is also a life of you with me and I with you. Called to communion with God, and in God, with one another. And this is the call of the Church.

And it is Jesus who ushers us into all these realities, not as mere words of some fool of a blog from some fool of a priest, but as a living reality, as food and drink for our souls, as a foundation we can live on, a height to which we can ascend. Jesus is the Son, and only in his Sonship and in our shared life with Him, can we know the Father in truth.

So that’s the first two words of the prayer. Perhaps the most important two words in the prayer; arguably the rest of the prayer is a commentary on how to live with God as our Father. But there is a call in all this, and a good call it is in this Year of Faith, to really slow down and look at these basic faith elements, these most common prayers and practices, and really delve into what they mean, why we do them, where they take us.

So… time for another series on the blog. I want to do something a little different for a few days. Since Pope Benedict here invites us to pay this close attention to the Our Father, I am going to let myself be ‘German Shepherded’ to do just that, and for the next days, rather than the usual blog format (quote the pope, discuss the quote), I will simply write meditations on each petition of the prayer. Hope you will enjoy it, and that it will be a spark to your own meditation and delving into the heart of Christ which is the doorway to the heart of the Trinity.

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Mighty Mites


The basic reason why man can speak with God arises from the fact that God himself is speech, word. His nature is to speak, to hear, to reply, as we see particularly in Johannine theology, where Son and Spirit are described in terms of pure hearing: they speak in response to what they have first heard. Only because there is already speech, ‘Logos’, in God can there be speech, ‘Logos’, to God. Philosophically we could put it like this: the Logos in God is the onto-logical foundation for prayer.

The Prologue of John’s Gospel speaks of the connection in its very first sentences: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was in communication with God.’ (Jn 1:1)—as a more precise translation of the Greek προϛ suggests, rather than the usual ‘with God.’ It expresses the act of turning to God, of relationship. Since there is relationship within God himself, there can also be a participation in this relationship. Thus we can relate to God in a way which does not contradict his nature.

Feast of Faith, 25

Reflection – It is just possible that many if not most readers of this blog have not lain awake at night agonizing over the ontological foundation of prayer and how it is possible for an infinite and transcendent God to hear the prayers of finite humans.

Most of us who pray just sort of take it for granted. You pray; God hears; that’s it. How God answers our prayers, or quite often doesn’t appear to—that’s more the issue that disturbs the peace of the average Christian

Whether or not we get it quite, though, the issue raised by Ratzinger in this passage is very real. God is wholly other than us, an entirely different Being… to the point that we can hardly speak of God correctly in human terms at all. To call God ‘a’ being is misleading, as it implies that God is one being among many. To call God a certain ‘kind of’ being is even worse; that puts God on some kind of continuum with rocks, plant, animals, us, angels. Even to call God Being Itself is not quite-quite—this makes God a sort of cosmic underwriter for the rest of us beings.

It is the strangeness of God that we can easily miss. God is not just a Really Big Guy. He (and even there, we choose the least-inadequate pronoun!) is Infinite Mystery, Infinite Unknown, the Absolute and Utterly Beyond of all beyonds... and even then our words fall badly short and go awry. We can heap superlatives upon superlatives upon capital letters (The Infinite of the Utter Absolute of the Beyond Transcendent Hugeness!!!) and it is all just as infinitely falling short of Who God Is.

And so this strange reality of dialogue with God is indeed a strange reality. May as well strike up a conversation with a super-nova, or the force of gravity, or the color red. Except… that God is a Trinity of persons. God is in conversation with God, and in the Logos who is Jesus, we are drawn into that conversation.

This, of course, has enormous significance for us. It means we are drawn, not just into a dialogue with God, but into the interior life of God. By the simple act of praying, we are drawn into the communion of the Trinity. The wee child kneeling at his bed side saying, “God bless mommy, God bless daddy, and God bless me,” is participating in the life of God.

And we are all that wee child. All of us are tiny mites of being, crawling on the surface of the cosmos… and all of us are immense, terrible creatures called into the very life of God the Supreme One.

Mystery upon mystery upon mystery. And that’s what you and I do every day when we lisp and stutter and blunder through our daily prayers, half our mind on something else (on a good day). We enter God’s life and become filled with that life for the world.

Sunday, June 3, 2012

Vinegar and Honey

Saint Augustine, in a homily on the First Letter of John, describes very beautifully the intimate relationship between prayer and hope. He defines prayer as an exercise of desire. Man was created for greatness—for God himself; he was created to be filled by God. But his heart is too small for the greatness to which it is destined. It must be stretched. “By delaying [his gift], God strengthens our desire; through desire he enlarges our soul and by expanding it he increases its capacity [for receiving him]”.

Augustine refers to Saint Paul, who speaks of himself as straining forward to the things that are to come (cf. Phil ). He then uses a very beautiful image to describe this process of enlargement and preparation of the human heart. “Suppose that God wishes to fill you with honey [a symbol of God's tenderness and goodness]; but if you are full of vinegar, where will you put the honey?” The vessel, that is your heart, must first be enlarged and then cleansed, freed from the vinegar and its taste. This requires hard work and is painful, but in this way alone do we become suited to that for which we are destined.

Even if Augustine speaks directly only of our capacity for God, it is nevertheless clear that through this effort by which we are freed from vinegar and the taste of vinegar, not only are we made free for God, but we also become open to others. It is only by becoming children of God, that we can be with our common Father. To pray is not to step outside history and withdraw to our own private corner of happiness. When we pray properly we undergo a process of inner purification which opens us up to God and thus to our fellow human beings as well.
Spe Salvi 33

Reflection – Vinegar and honey! Nice images to ponder on a lovely Trinity Sunday, as we strive (not without some difficulty) to contemplate the inner reality of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the transcendent communion of persons in the one Godhead that alternately bemuses and entrances us.
We get a glimpse of what this doctrine of the Trinity means (see yesterday’s post) and are astounded at its implications. Then we lose it, and it all becomes a jumble of words – Three in One, One in Three, round and round it goes… what’s it mean?

It’s this whole business the Pope writes so beautifully of here, in which we are made for such a depth of communion and life with this God, and yet in our current state of being we are too small, too cramped, too bound by human thinking and acting.

We are made for the sweetness of communion and love, of total gift and total reception, but are filled with the vinegar of self-will and self-seeking. And so, the whole path of prayer is laid out here in this passage. God gives us a desire for Him, but withholds the fulfillment of that desire—and so we grow larger as we strain upwards to Him. God stands before us, sweetness itself, joy of life and beauty in full, but His work in us is mainly draining out the vinegar and scrubbing our walls of its acidic taint.

Yes, this is the way of God with us. It’s like the whole ‘plot’ (if you will) of the Song of Songs in the Old Testament. The Lover keeps knocking at the door of the Beloved’s room, pressing in at her window, sticking his hand in at her lattice… and then disappearing. She runs out, searching for Him… she leaves her chamber, runs through the city, is beaten and mocked… and then she finds him, and joy is hers. Vinegar, then honey. Smallness, then immensity.

God is doing this in all of our lives. We want to nestle into our little chamber, our comfortable little room (symbolically speaking). He has made us for something bigger, something better, and he lures us outside of ourselves.

And in this luring, in this stirring us up out of complacency and comfort, he calls us to our brothers and sisters, too. God is Love; as we yearn for God and run after Him, we too must be love. And so prayer is this grand adventure, one not without pain and toil, struggle and darkness, but a grand adventure nonetheless. Out of self and safety into the wild of God, into the risk of love, into the immensity of the Trinity and the endless mystery and depth it holds for us.

Saturday, June 2, 2012

Why Bother With The Trinity?

Hey, Happy Trinity Sunday, y'all!
Some folks using that there Google thingy on the Internet discovered one of my early posts from last summer, about why the Trinity matters. I had forgotten all about that post, but read it, liked it, and thought I would share it with you.
Here's the link (I realize my links are invisible, because I need to redesign the blog, and don't have time!):
The Trinity: Why Bother?
Hope it helps you enter the spirit of the feast!

Monday, July 11, 2011

The Trinity: Why Bother?

Being made in the image of God means that the human person is a being of word and of love, a being moving toward Another, oriented toward giving himself to the Other and only truly receiving himself back in real self-giving.

Reflection – What difference does the Trinity make, anyway? (The doctrine, that is, not the reality.) Many Christians would be unable to give a coherent answer to that question, let alone a coherent account of what it even means to say that God is three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
What difference does it make? Why bother with this difficult dogma? This very brief quote of Ratzinger’s points to an answer. While the Trinity is an unfathomable and infinite mystery, which even in heaven we will never exhaust, our Scriptures and our theological tradition has spoken of the Son as the Word, the perfect self-knowledge of God, and of the Spirit as the perfect love emanating forth from the Father’s perfect knowledge of the Son and the Son’s reciprocal knowledge of the Father.
The Scriptural testimony of humanity being made in the image of God, then, means that we are made in the image of the Trinity – made to know and to love, made to receive and to give. That the human person is not a closed off fortress, an autonomous self made to grab and grasp and consume as much of the world’s riches as possible. Rather, he is known by God, made to know God, loved by God, made to love God. An inherently relational creature, whose very being is only found and made comprehensible in this constant circle of gift, reception, and gift.
God as Trinity, taken together with man as made in the image of God breaks us out of the terrible burden of competition, self-aggrandizement, and isolation. The two together reveal to us that at the deepest depths of reality, of Being, is relation, communion, love, and that out of this flows glory, delight, beauty, and joy. The Trinity reveals to us that infinite happiness, found in a communion of persons, is at the heart of all that is. That’s the difference it makes.