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FROM A READING FOR JUNE 11, TRINITY SUNDAY
'Put things in order, listen to my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace and the God of love and peace will be with you...' -- 2 Cor 13:11-12

Sunday's celebration of Trinity Sunday reminds of the truth of the matter: We as human beings are called to communion.

We need communion with each other, because the God in whose image and likeness we are created is, in Himself, a communion of love and knowledge.

In the Most Blessed Trinity, we see how we are called to live and to love as Christians in the world.

Pope's thoughts
Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, in a Sunday Angelus address in 2009, remarked on "three persons who are one God because the Father is love; the Son is love; the Spirit is love.

"God is wholly and only love, the purest, infinite and eternal love. He does not live in splendid solitude but, rather, is an inexhaustible source of life that is ceaselessly given and communicated.

"To a certain extent, we can perceive this by observing both the macro-universe: our Earth, the planets, the stars, the galaxies; and the micro-universe: cells, atoms, elementary particles.

"The 'name' of the Blessed Trinity is, in a certain sense, imprinted upon all things, because all that exists, down to the last particle, is in relation; in this way we catch a glimpse of God as relationship and ultimately, creator love. All things derive from love, aspire to love and move impelled by love, though naturally with varying degrees of awareness and freedom.

"The strongest proof that we are made in the image of the Trinity is this: Love alone makes us happy, because we live in a relationship, and we live to love and to be loved. Borrowing an analogy from biology, we could say that, imprinted upon his 'genome,' the human being bears a profound mark of the Trinity, of God as Love."

We as human beings, in our very nature, mirror that inner life of the triune God. In no greater way is that expressed than when we strive to live lives of communion with one another. Listen to the words of the epistle offered to us Sunday from St. Paul (II Cor 13:11-13). The Apostle Paul exhorts us to love one another, to "greet each other with a holy kiss" -- in other words, to live a life of harmony.

How does he end this passage? With nothing less than the words offered as the first option for the greeting in the introductory rites of the Mass: "The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with all of you."

Trinity a model
The inner life of God in the Most Blessed Trinity offers us the model of how we are to live as Christians: namely, in the world, yet not of the world -- but also not apart from one another.

We all called to be "leaven in the world:" to transform the world by our presence and by the daily living of the Gospel. The answer to how to live as an authentic Christian in the world today is found when we as Christians can live our lives in communion with our brothers and sisters in the world.

Our Gospel (John 3:16-18) reminds us that "God so loved the world that He gave His only Son so that everyone who believes in Him might not perish, but have eternal life."

Despite the fact that we can be a "stiff-necked people" (Ex 34:4b-6,8-9), we are redeemed by the Lord and we are called to communion.

May our prayer today echo the words of our Mass' responsorial psalm (Dn 3): "glory and praise forever."[[In-content Ad]]

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