At a funeral a few years back, the family wanted me to share something the deceased man wrote. His name was Dennis.
I would like begin my reflection with his words:
“It is good to slow down and see the beauty in life
I don’t think most people ever do!
There is truly something sacred in everything in life.
And only a quite mind can see the beauty
and try not to capture it, contain it, put into words, ideas, theories etc.
Man is surrounded in love
but can never slow down enough to see the beauty.
If he did, he would never kill again,
nor would he destroy the planet with his greed.
Beauty, love, the sacred can never be contained by man’s attempt to seek it.
It can come only to the person who can receive it,
quietly, effortlessly, simply.
For the self can never contain that which is immeasurable – the sacred.”
Today we celebrate the Holy Trinity. The Trinity is often called a mystery.’ Should every mystery have to be unravelled? I agree with Dennis that perhaps there are some things of which we should only “see the beauty and try not to capture it, contain it, or put into words, ideas, and theories. “For the self,” he says, “can never contain that which is immeasurable – the sacred.” Today, instead of talking about the Trinity as ‘mystery,’ I would like to talk about Trinity simply as ‘beauty.’
Trinity as Beauty
A couple of weeks back, in another homily, I had shared the story of the little boy who asked Pope Francis the question, “What did God do before God created the world?” Pope Francis answered him saying, “Before God created the world, God loved! Because God is love.” But then Pope Francis went on to say, “I know this is not very theological, but you will understand — this love between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit was so overflowing, so big, that it could not be contained. It had to be poured out, so as to share that love with those out of himself. And then God created the world.”
This is why I want to reflect on the Trinity as beauty, because the beauty of nature, the grandeur of creation, the vastness of the universe, the myriads of colours, the range of melodies, the variety of creatures, and the diversity of humanity are a reflection of the love of the God we call, Trinity. If creation, which reflects the Trinity is so beautiful, how much more beautiful must be the Trinity and the love between them. Trinity is beauty.
In my next two points I want to further build on Pope Francis’ thought on the Trinity, in relation to creation, and discover its beauty. I am going to rely heavily on his encyclical Laudato Si for this. Towards the end of the encyclical, Pope Francis draws a very beautiful link between Trinity and Creation.
Beauty Distorted
Before the Fall, Pope Francis says, human beings were able to see how the Trinity was imprinted on every created thing and being. “Each creature bears in itself a specifically Trinitarian structure, so real that it could be readily contemplated if only the human gaze were not so partial, dark and fragile.” In other words, Creation is intrinsically Trinitarian, but sin affected our ability to see it.
Thus, Pope Francis says that our challenge today is to read all reality in a Trinitarian key. In other words, we have to train ourselves again to see, to hear, and the experience the Trinitarian imprint on Creation. We have to train ourselves to see beauty again in all of God’s creation, in all of God’s creatures, and in all of the human race. (Laudato Si’, 239)
We end up destroying creation because we don’t see it as bearing the imprint of the Trinity. We end up hurting God’s creatures because we do not see them as an expression of God’s beauty. We end up exploiting human beings, seeing some races inferior to others, hating and killing other human beings because we do not see in them the beauty of the Trinitarian image.
In Dennis’s words, “Man is surrounded in love but can never slow down enough to see the beauty. If he did, he would never kill again, nor would he destroy the planet with his greed.”
How can we repair our distorted vision? How can we undo the damage?
A Web of Relationships: Beauty Restored
Pope Francis’ answer to the question I raise is that we imitate the relationship that exists between the persons of the Trinity. Pope Francis calls it, “a subsistent relationship,” or a relationship that continues to exist even to this day. This means that the world, created according to the divine model, is a web of relationships.
I would like to read a rather long extract from Laudato Si’ to make this clearer.
Pope Francis says, “Creatures and human beings tend towards God, and in turn it is proper to every living being to tend towards other things, so that throughout the universe we can find any number of constant and secretly interwoven relationships. This leads us not only to marvel at the manifold connections existing among creatures… but the human person grows more, matures more, and is sanctified more to the extent that he or she enters into relationships, going out from themselves to live in communion with God, with others, and with all creatures. In this way, they make their own that trinitarian dynamism which God imprinted in them when they were created. Everything is interconnected, and this invites us to develop a spirituality of that global solidarity which flows from the mystery of the Trinity” (Laudato Si’, 240).
The Trinity is a mystery but before anything else, it is the beauty of the love between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit imprinted on all of creation and the web of relationships it creates. To restore our vision and see the imprint of the Trinity on all creation, we must see our connectedness – to God, to creation, and to all of humanity. To undo the damage, we must rediscover Trinity as beauty and the beauty of creation as the imprint of the Most Holy Trinity. As Dennis says, “It is good to slow down and see the beauty in life.”
At the offertory during the Eucharist, God is addressed as God of all creation. The bread and wine represent all of creation and the work of human hands. The Father sends the Holy Spirit to change the bread and wine in the Body and Blood Christ. The Eucharist is, as it were, a recreation. As we receive the Body and Blood of Christ may we begin to see the Trinitarian imprint in all creation, in all creatures, and in all humanity. Let us rediscover the Trinity as beauty.
Image: The Most Holy Trinity, on iconostaisis in the church of St. George in place Guke near Pljevlja – Republic of Montenegro, oil on canvas laid on gold plated panel, 110 x 140 cm, 2011. By Milesevac – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38119638
Fr. Satish Joseph was ordained in India in 1994 and incardinated into the archdiocese of Cincinnati in 2008. He has a Masters in Communication and Doctorate in Theology from the University of Dayton. He is presently Pastor at Immaculate Conception and St. Helen parishes in Dayton, OH. He is also the founder Ite Missa Est ministries (www.itemissaest.org) and uses social media extensively for evangelization. He is also the founder of MercyPets (www.mercypets.org) — a charitable fund that invites pet-owners to donate a percent of their pet expenses to alleviate child hunger. MercyPets is active in four countries since its founding in December 2017. Apart from serving at the two parishes, he facilitates retreats, seminars and parish missions.
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