We must live our lives in communion with others

The celebration of Trinity Sunday reminds us 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 Emeritus Benedict XVI in a Sunday Angelus in 2009 said:

“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 and in no greater way is that expressed than when we strive to live lives of communion with one another. The inner life of God in the Most Blessed Trinity offers to us the model of how we are to live as Christians: namely in the world, yet not of the world, yes, 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.

Father John P. Cush, STD is a priest of the Diocese of Brooklyn. He serves as the academic dean of the Pontifical North American College in Rome, Italy. Father Cush is the author of The How-to-Book of Catholic Theology (OSV, 2020).