Blog # 155 The Holy Trinity

Blog #155 The Holy Trinity This is a copy of another bulletin from St.William's, Sandersville,June 11, 1995. At the present moment we do not have any Chinese members at St. Wiliam's. So I would feel safe in saying that few or none of us know how to speak or read Chinese. We do not sing our songs in Chinese. We do not enjoy reading Chinese poems. We do not read Chinese newspapers. Yet all these experiences would be possible for us through education and practice. The Feast of the Most Holy Trinity each year gives us an opportunity to realize or remind ourselves it is not this way with God. Possess the most brilliant human mind that ever was created, study for years and years, associate with the holiest people on earth, pray with the deepest faith and the most generous love we can imagine, and we still do not know or possess God as someone might know and possess Chinese. Though the Chinese language is a very difficult one for us Westerners to master, and the poetry and music of the Chinese people is very rich and beautiful, yet it is limited. God is not. There is the difference. God is infinite, without beginning, without end, without limits, without bounds. Since we and all of our experience is finite and limited we cannot even imagine what it means to say God is infinite. Though I would run out of time before ever I would do it, I can imagine myself singing every Chinese song that ever was written. That is a lot of music, almost unimaginable! God is beyond that, totally unimginable! All of our human experience, great as it is, is limited. I drink a glass of milk, not all the milk there is. I see the moon, but not always. I read a newspaper, but not every newspaper. My dictionary contains more than 142,000 words. I can use only a fraction of them. Even if I knew them all, new words are being put into use each year as we discover and express new things in our limited world. My limited experience of a limited world is yet open-ended. It can grow and increase so that I get closer and closer to drinking all the milk there is, seeng the moon always, etc. even though I never arrive at this point. But with God it is totally different. All along I am actually drinking milk, seing the moon, but "No one has ever seen God." (Jn 1:18; 1 Jn 4: 12). All of our experience, always limited, is of something or of someone. Adjectives, verbs, adverbs, nouns, pronouns, and prepositions express it all. John is strong. Mary is wise and beautiful. Fred is a lawyer. He is Mary's husband. God simply IS. Our mind, our capacity, our experience stops infinitely short of this. We do not know what "No one has ever seen God." means. Yet we pray, which means we stand in the presence of God to speak to God in praise adoration thanksgiving and petition. If there is such an infinite gap between ourselves and God as I have been speaking of, then how can it be that we confidently talk to God in prayer Is it real? Yes, it is real. But even in prayer it is more God contacing us rather than we making contact with God. In other words, even prayer is a gift. God loves us, and love seeks to be close to the one who is loved. God's infinite love was not to be frustrated by the gap between us. God came among us as one of us, g enuinely like us in all but sin. He taught us of theFather, and the Spirit, and Himself, as divine. The Father is God. The Son is God. The Spirit is God. The danger is not that we fail to understand the mystery of the Holy Trinity, but to think that we do understand. Or the other extreme to think and act and respond to an image of God we ourselves create as though God were just a better one of us, almost as seei ngGod created to our image rather than the other way around. To pray should be an awesome experience, a most preciouos gift. Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be!