This Sunday we celebrate the central mystery of our faith, the faith that God is one and yet not solitary.  He exists in a communion of love, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Love is at the center of God’s being and constitutes his divine being.  Love is not something that God has or that God does, it is what God is.  All of the mysteries of our faith and the whole history of revelation follows from the foundation of our belief in God as one in three distinct persons.  The Catechism of the Catholic Church informs us:  “The mystery of the Holy Trinity is the central mystery of Christian faith and life.  It is the mystery of God in himself.  It is therefore the source of all the other mysteries of faith, the light that enlightens them.  It is the most fundamental and essential teaching in the “hierarchy of the truths of faith.”  The whole history of salvation is identical with the history of the way and the means by which the one true God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, reveals himself to men “and reconciles and unites with himself those who turn away from sin.”” (CCC 234)

     The history of our faith and of our life and relationship with God, the Holy Trinity, is a story of love, the love of God that overflows his very being and that manifests itself in creation.  All things are created in God’s love.  The human person is a unique part of that creation that is created for God himself.  God creates human persons in his “image and likeness” so that we might share with him in a life of love, grace and holiness.  God invites us to share in his divine life of love within the Trinity by uniting ourselves to him in a communion of love.  The meaning of our life is found in this profound intimate experience of communion with God.  St. John tells us in his letter to the Church that, “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins.”  (1Jn 4,10)  All of our experiences of love find their source in God’s-first-loving us.  Again the Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us, “But St. John goes even further when he affirms that “God is love”: God’s very being is love.  By sending his only son and the Spirit of Love in the fullness of time, God has revealed his innermost secret: God himself is an eternal exchange of love, Father, Son, And Holy Spirit, and he has destined us to share in that exchange.” (CCC 221)

     The oneness that love brings about in the Holy Trinity is also something that Jesus wanted us to share in the Church.  Jesus prays to the Father for all who will come to believe in the love of the Trinity “that they may all be one; even as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.”  (Jn 17,21)  As the Son exists eternally in the Father’s love, so does Jesus pray that we all may exist eternally in that communion of love.  This love becomes our witness to others of God’s place in our lives and of the great mystery of his redemptive love.  Without love, without God, we would be nothing.  God leads us into that love through his gift of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  We are never disappointed in hope for God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit. (Rom 5,5)

     The mystery of the Holy Trinity is something that does not lend itself to being dissected and analyzed in a positivistic way, rather we are invited to simply share in the experience of love.  The experience of God’s love through our experience of the Son and the Holy Spirit helps us to understand this profound mystery of love and its place in our lives.  Our “knowing” of this mystery is the knowing of this mystery through an intimate relationship of love with the Father through prayer and sacrament.  May our knowing lead to believing in this profound mystery and so in being saved and one day sharing in the eternal life of love that is the Holy Trinity!