We Have an Eternal Home!
Each year on the first Sunday after Pentecost we celebrate the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, also known as Trinity Sunday. Although it wasn’t until 1334 that Pope John XXII officially established the feast for universal observance in the Western Church, the mystery of the Holy Trinity has been the pulse of the Church’s life since the very beginning. The Trinity is “the central mystery of Christian faith and life…[and is] the source of all the other mysteries of faith” (CCC 234). The whole of the Church’s life flows from the central belief that the one true God exists as three divine Persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Since the very beginning of time, God has gradually revealed and communicated the truth of who he is as Trinitarian through what he has done in salvation history (see CCC 53-67). Although God gradually revealed himself throughout different stages of the Old Testament period of salvation history, mankind had no way of knowing the full truth of God’s inner life of the Trinity before the time of Christ, since this mystery of our faith is “inaccessible to human reason alone…before the Incarnation of God’s Son and the sending of the Holy Spirit” (CCC 237).
In his encyclical Spe Salvi, Pope Benedict XVI poses a challenging question: “So now we must ask explicitly: is the Christian faith also for us today a life-changing and life-sustaining hope…which shapes our life in a new way, or is it just ‘information’” (Spe Salvi 10) that doesn’t change us? Furthermore, what difference does this central mystery of our faith make in our daily lives?
Trinity Sunday is an invitation to remember that “[being] Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction” (Deus Caritas Est 1). In revealing himself as Trinitarian, God hasn’t merely shared impersonal facts about himself; rather, God has shared himself with us, and has invited us into his own inner life and communion of love, which alone is the origin, goal, and meaning of our life. As we read in the Catechism, “By sending his only Son and the Spirit of Love in the fullness of time, God has revealed his innermost secret: God himself is an eternal exchange of love, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and he has destined us to share in that exchange” (CCC 221). On Trinity Sunday, the Church proclaims the truth about God—that God is love (1 John 4:8)—and the truth about us: we are made for this love. We eternally belong to God—we have an eternal home!
St. Elizabeth of the Trinity leads us more deeply into this reality by saying that “The Trinity—this is our dwelling, our ‘home,’ the Father’s house that we must never leave.” When speaking with his disciples before his Passion, Jesus directed the gaze of their hearts towards this truth: “In my Father’s house there are many rooms…and when I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also” (John 14:2-3). Jesus continued to reveal more of the Father’s loving plan: “I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you…If a man loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him” (John 14:18, 23). Jesus reveals to his disciples the Father’s breathtaking desire. He desires not only that we be at home in him when we get to heaven in the future, but he desires us to be at home in him now—and so, he comes to us, he makes his home among us (c.f., John 1:14) in order to make his home in us. Thus, with the Feast of Pentecost and the sending of the Holy Spirit, God fulfills his promise to never leave us orphans. This is why the Church celebrates Trinity Sunday the week after Pentecost: On Pentecost, “the Holy Trinity is fully revealed” (CCC 732).
“I will not leave you orphans!” If Jesus has promised to never leave us orphans, then that means we have a permanent home—we eternally belong to the Father as children of his heavenly household! This is the mystery into which the Church invites us more deeply on the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity. Yet this truth is also the very gift that that we are invited to share with all whom God entrusts to us in our daily lives: “Love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12). Every human heart longs for its eternal home. Today, we invite the Trinity to be more at home in our hearts in order to make them a more welcoming home for others—that through our smile, our gentleness, our availability of heart, everyone whom the Father entrusts to us may experience the Love that is their eternal home.
