This weekend we celebrate the Most Holy Trinity, one of the great mysteries of our faith. This mystery of the Holy Trinity is a basic doctrine of faith in Christianity, understandable not with our heads but with our hearts. It teaches us that there are three distinct persons in one God, sharing the same divine nature. Our mind cannot grasp this doctrine which teaches that 1+ 1+ 1 = 1 and not 3. As a former Math teacher, this is more than puzzling to me! But I/we believe in this mystery because Jesus who IS divine taught it clearly, the Gospel writers recorded it, the Fathers of the Church tried to explain it and the Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople defined it as a dogma of Christian faith. I audited a course on the Trinity a few years ago at St. Bernard’s School of Theology. We had piles of reading to do for the course and one of the books I read gave me a better understanding of this mystery. Here’s what a section of the book said…when two human beings, like husband and wife, love each other very much and live together for years and years, they come to know each other deeply. Sometimes it’s even said that they begin to look like each other…AND they are able to finish each other’s sentences. It’s like they know what the other person is thinking…how they will react to given situations…and what they will choose when presented with a variety of options. In a way, they move toward being transparent to one another. For the Trinity, the persons of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are absolutely 100% transparent to one another…so much so that they are ONE GOD. Does this help your understanding? It helps me. The Trinitarian God abides in us and He is the source of our hope, courage and strength…He is our final destination. Every time you make the sign of the cross, you are proclaiming that you BELIEVE in the dogma of the Trinity. There is a very old and much-repeated story about St. Augustine, one of the intellectual giants of the Church. He was walking by the seashore one day, attempting to arrive at an intelligible explanation for the mystery of the Trinity. As he walked along, he saw a small boy on the beach, pouring seawater from a shell into a small hole in the sand. "What are you doing, my child?" asked Augustine. "I am emptying the sea into this hole," the boy answered with an innocent smile. "But that is impossible, my dear child,” said Augustine. The boy stood up, looked straight into the eyes of Augustine and replied, “What you are trying to do - comprehend the immensity of God with your small head - is even more impossible.” Then he vanished. The child was an angel sent by God to teach Augustine a lesson. Later, Augustine wrote: "You see the Trinity if you see love." According to him the Father is the lover, the Son is the loved one and the Holy Spirit is the personification of the very act of loving. This means that we can understand something of the mystery of the Holy Trinity more readily with the heart than with our feeble mind. GOSPEL HOMEWORK FOR THE WEEK: Think about what you are doing/saying when you make the sign of the cross.