Roman Rite
Ex 34.4-6.8-9; Dn 3.52-56; 2 Cor 13: 11-13; Jn. 3: 16-18
Ambrosian Rite
Ex 3,1-15; Ps 67; Rm 8: 14-17;
1) “The Father is the Lover, the Son is the Beloved, the Holy Ghost is Love” (St. Augustine).
The Trinity dogma is not the result of poetic fantasies or of philosophical elucubrations. Nor it is a rational theological formulation that offers the pretext of saying that it is a mystery so detached from our lives that more than one Christian feels quietly authorized to ignore it. The Mystery of the Trinity is a great mystery which surpasses our minds but speaks deeply to our heart because it is, in its essence, nothing but the explication of the profound expression of Saint John: “God is love” (1 Jn 4: 8,16). If God is love, he cannot be loneliness in himself. In order to have a love affair, it must be at least two. To love only oneself is not love, it is selfishness. God Love is, at least, one who always loves and one who has always been loved and reciprocates love: an eternal Lover, an eternal Beloved and an eternal Love.
The Lover is God, the Father in love, infinitely free and generous in love, motivated to love by no other thing than love.
The eternal Beloved, is the one who always welcomes love: he is eternal gratitude, grace without beginning and end. He is the Son in love.
Love is the Holy Spirit, in whom Their love is always open to self-donation and to “go out of their being”. Therefore, the Spirit is said to be a gift of God, a living source of love, a fire that powers in us the ability to reciprocate Love with love.
This mystery of love is concrete and close to us more than we think, and we live it in practice when, above all in the most important or critical times where we most need God, we make the sign of the cross. By marking this holy sign, almost without being fully aware, we call upon the One and Triune God , saying, “In the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost”. Not only do we invoke God Trinity to help us, but we praise with the prayer “Glory to the Father, and to the Son and the Holy Ghost … Amen”. St. Teresa of Calcutta often recited as follows: “Glory to the Father-Prayer and to the Son -Poverty, and the Holy Spirit- Zeal for souls. Amen-Mary. “
2) Liturgy of praise.
Therefore, today the Liturgy of the Church invites us to celebrate the solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, which is not an abstract dogma that does not affect our life. God One and Triune dogma teaches us that God is eternal and infinite love: “God is love” (1 Jn 4: 8,16), revealing to us that God, “is communion of divine Persons who are one with the other, one for the other, one in the other: this communion is the life of God, the mystery of love of the living God “(Pope Francis). We, made in the image and likeness of this God, are called to live this communion with God, in Him and for Him, and among us. Love, however, is truly self in the relationship with another that constitutes it. “In order to be charity, love must strive toward another” (St. Gregory the Great).
Today, the Church not only makes us contemplate the wonderful mystery from which we come from and to which we go, but also renews the invitation to live every day “the communion with God and among us on the pattern of divine communion. We are called to live not one without the others or against the others, but with and for each other “(Pope Francis).
Today, the Liturgy makes us celebrate the Feast of the Trinity as praise to God not only for what He does for us, but for how He is in Himself and for us. He is pure, infinite and eternal love. God is the Only Begotten Son, eternal Incarnate Wisdom, dead and risen for us. God is the Holy Spirit that moves everything, history and the world, to the full final recapitulation, so that all men can say with all their being “our Father”.
Today, in this Solemnity, on the one hand we are called to “contemplate, so to speak, the Heart of God, its profound reality that is to be unity in the Trinity, highest and deep communion of love and life” ( Benedict XVI). On the other hand, we are invited to pray that the One and Triune God may uphold our faith, “inspire feelings of peace of hope, and give us the grace to engage in our daily events” (Pope Francis), making us a source of communion and consolation, of mercy and of forgiveness, of grace and of compassion.
This implies taking seriously the invitation that Christ still renews today welcoming and witnessing the Gospel of love: to live the love of God and toward the neighbor, sharing joys and suffering, and learning to seek and grant forgiveness.
We have been asked to build the Church so that it is increasingly “a people assembled by the unity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost”. This beautiful definition of St. Cyprian (De Orat.Dom.23; see LG 4) introduces us into the mystery of the Church, made a community of salvation by the presence of God Trinity. Like the ancient people of God, it is guided in its new Exodus by the column of clouds during the day and by the column of fire at night, symbols of the constant divine presence.
3) The Trinity in our Life.
The entire Christian life is accompanied by the Trinity. I would say more, and I hope to say it well,: the Trinity is the “fabric” of our life. In fact, we are baptized (= immersed) in the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and “we are called to participate in the life of the Blessed Trinity, here in the darkness of faith, and beyond death in the eternal light” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 263).
Not only Baptism, but all the other Sacraments of the Church are conferred with the sign of the Cross and in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
In fact, we have been confirmed with the anointing in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
In the Sacrament of Penance, we are forgiven for our sins in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
Again, in this name the bride and groom are united in marriage and their love is lifted up to that of God, who is the guarantor of their mutual loyalty.
In the Eucharist, the Triune God, who in itself is love (see 1 Jn 4: 7-8), is fully involved with our human condition. In the bread and in the consecrated wine is the whole divine life that reaches us and participates in us in the form of the Sacrament.
In the priestly ordination, the new priests are consecrated in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Thanks to this, the priest is placed in the Trinitarian dynamics with a special responsibility. His identity stems from the ministry of the Word and the Sacraments that is in essential relation to the mystery of the saving love of the Father (see Jn 17,6-9,24, 1Cor 1,1, 2Cor 1,1), along with the priesthood of Christ, who chooses and calls his own minister to be with Him (see Mk 3:15), and with the gift of the Spirit (see Jn 20:21) “(Congregation for the Clergy, Directorate for the Ministry And the Life of the Priests, February 11, 2013).
In illness and in the last hour, when the priest will anoint us, he will recommend the soul in the name of the Father who created us, of the Son who has redeemed us, and of the Holy Spirit who has sanctified us.
In this way, all of our Christian existence is under the irradiation of the Trinity, who lives in us in a state of grace: “We will come to him – Jesus promised us – to make our home in Him.”
If being the dwelling place of God, the living home of the Trinity, is the vocation of every Christian, it is especially true for the consecrated Virgins.
With the total gift of themselves in the hands of the bishop, these women testify in a special way to the Trinitarian dimension of the Christian life.
In fact, virginity is somehow the deification of man: “There can be no better praise of virginity unless we show that it deifies, so to speak, those who participate in its pure mysteries, to the point of making them communicate with the glory Of God, the only truly holy and immaculate, admitting them in his own familiarity through purity and incorruptibility “(St Gregory of Nyssa, De Virginitate, 1, 1-2, 256 s.)
Virginity therefore originates from the Trinity and lives in the Trinity, bound as it is to the generation of the Son by the Father, brought as a gift to men by the Word who comes into the world in the same way as it is generated by the Father, that is, by a Virgin. This is how, in the Christian person, virginity produces effects similar to those that occurred “in Mary the Immaculate, when all the fullness of the deity that was in Christ shone in her. Jesus no longer comes with his physical presence, but lives spiritually in us, and with us brings us the Father “( St Gregory of Nyssa, De Virginitate, 2).
It is clear that this ideal of life characterized by spiritual virginity is proposed to all Christians, even the married ones, as a requirement of perfection. St. Gregory and the other Fathers see clearly that those who choose, always by God’s gift, also corporal virginity, abstaining from marriage, and imitating Jesus and Mary, find the original integrity in which man was created or, as he says, the condition of “the first man in his first life” (St Gregory of Nyssa, De Virginitate, 12, 4. 4; 416 s).