As I prepared my reflection for this, Trinity Sunday, I read, prayed and thought. Oh, did I think—with thoughts that went around and around and really going nowhere. The Trinity—one God, three persons, one of the major, if not THE major truth and mystery of Christianity!

As I read, I discovered this reflection in The Word Among Us. It is by Father Walter Burghardt, priest, preacher and theologian. When I first saw it, I knew it would be the bulk of MY reflection. But as I read it and reread it, contemplated it, I knew I had to use it as he had written it. It is too beautiful to pull apart and try to redo.

Love Among and Within Us

The astounding truth about the Trinity is that it is the perfect realization of perfect love. God’s secret is this: There is “I and thou” without “mine” and thine.” The Father is not the Son; the Son is not the Father; the Holy Spirit is neither the Father nor the Son. Each is a real person. And still, there is no “mine and thine,” no egoism. The Father gives to the Son literally all that He Himself has, all that makes Him God, all that makes Him Love. The Son, perfect image of the Father, loves the Father to selfless perfection. And, marvel beyond comprehension, the love with which Father and Son love each other, that love is a person. That love is the Holy Spirit.

But God’s love does not hide in outer space. Perfect love has touched our earth; we glimpse it in the life God shared with us. The Father, John declares, “so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life” (Jn 3:16) The Son, Paul lyricizes, did not think His glory something to cling to, a prize to clutch. He took our bone and marrow, our skin and sinews. Not because He needed them. He took what is ours only to give us what is His, to let us share God’s life, God’s glory. And the Holy Spirit? The Spirit is not only the love between Father and Son; the Spirit is God’s Gift to you and me. “If I leave you,” Jesus said the night before Calvary, “it is only to send you my Spirit, to be with you always, to teach you all truth, to be my Presence among you, my Presence within you” (cf. Jn 16:7-15.) End of Fr. Burghardt

Father and Son, so strongly united in love send that love into the world as their Holy Spirit to love us, to guide us, to lift us to share in that life Christ promised “that all may be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us ”.(Jn 17:21.)

Linda Caminiti