Today is the solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity. The doctrine of the Trinity is not an easy one for many people. I remember in grade school being taught that there are three Persons in one God, which never really made a whole lot of sense to me or the other students at Sts. Simon and Jude Grammar School.
My friend Amy Uelmen, a member of the Focolare community and director of Fordham’s Institute of Religion, Law, and Lawyer’s Work, has written much about the Trinity. In a piece in America magazine, she once talked about the fact that the life of the Trinity “can serve as a model for social relationships in which ‘true openness does not mean loss of individual identity but profound interpenetration’… As Chiara Lubich described the dynamic, ‘I am myself not when I close myself off from the other, but rather when I give myself, when out of love I lose myself in the other.'”
We are made in the image of a Trinitarian God. Therefore, while we retain an individual identity, we are fundamentally interconnected with each other. We share a “profound interpenetration,” meaning that our relationship to each other is not incidental, but is integral to who we are.
When God the Trinity says in Genesis, “Let us make man in our image,” the image in which we are created is one of a community of love. We know God most fully, we are most fully who we were created to be, when we live in loving communion.
Happy Trinity Sunday.
Creo en Dios! 