Scripture Reflections for the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity

“what I’m realizing here in Tanzania (yes – God had to drag me literally to the other side of the world to teach this stiff-necked missioner) – is that it really has nothing to do with what I am doing. It has everything to do with who I am being...We are called first to BE; the doing (eventually) will follow.”

“God is powerful and has standards which he expects to be lived—yet his nature is one of mercy, graciousness, and faithfulness. He seeks to share his nature in a committed relationship with us ordinary humans, i.e, by love.”

“We become like what we worship. How important, then, truly to understand the nature of the God we worship. The worship of the Trinity should lead us to a life of self-giving love.”

“The doctrine of the Trinity which we celebrate this Sunday is then at the heart of the Christian religion, not because it offers us an abstruse dogma, but because it articulates the relationship of shared love into which we are drawn for our salvation”

“Our God is never tired of us. We can’t just imagine how often He desires to be closer to us and longs that we come back to Him...He does not expect us to love Him the same way He loves us, but He just want us to love Him not for His sake but for our sake.”

“our Christian faith motivates us; we believe we receive the Holy Spirit in the sacrament of baptism not just for oureselves, but for the common good”

“The revelation of God as Triune, therefore, is not a mathematical conundrum, nor a logical puzzle, but it is a mystery even as the relationship of love between two human beings can be ‘mysterious’”

“This is today’s challenge, to love as God loves us, who forgives us even as Moses’ people were forgiven, who uses our sins and limitations to draw us closer through forgiveness”

“God must remain a mystery to our minds – or we have made some serious blunder in our thinking. But the point of life is not to understand the ineffable but to be docile to the divine plan and drawn into that intimate communion which is the life of the Trinity.”

“The doctrine of the Trinity is a great gift to us. It helps us see that we are truly brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ, not only in his humanity, but also in his divinity.”

“No formula can ever capture the reality of God because God is too rich to ever be captured, even half adequately, in imagination, thought, and word. The God that atheism rejects is precisely a conceptualized God, a God captured in a picture.”

“our creation as human beings will not be complete until we are partly divine, until the spirit we call ours is in fact the Holy Spirit of God”

“God is community – and only in opening our lives in gracious hospitality will we ever understand that”

“There are so many reasons to fall into despair and to give up hope and the possibility of redemption for humanity yet this is not how God saw the world”

“It's because God is a trinitarian play of persons we can be saved. Not just outside of God begging for mercy but now through God's grace inside the dynamics of God's life, gathered by the Son into the power of the Holy Spirit.”

“The world is loved by God. We are not saved in order to be saved from the world. Salvation is relational. We are saved for relationship with God, for eternal life with God.”

“The love that God is from all eternity is made manifest in his covenantal love for Israel but it's made unsurpassingly manifest in this great act by which the Father sends the Son into the world to gather us into his life”

“whenever I think about the Trinity or start talking about it I realize we are million miles away from a mere abstraction. We are getting very close to the heart of the deepest mystery of who God is and what the very dynamics of salvation are.”

“Trinity Sunday is a reflection on what reality is at its deepest level and upon what our salvation is. It is a surrender to love that wants us to be fully alive.”

“Which is why, Christians, that when we love we participate in what God is, we find joy...this is about the very structure of your life. The more you love the more you're like God and that gives you joy.”