Three Lovely Moments with God (Trinity Sunday)

An atheist was walking through the woods. 'What majestic trees! 'What powerful rivers! 'What beautiful animals! He said to himself. Suddenly, he heard a rustling in the bushes behind him. He turned to look... and saw a 7-foot grizzly bear charge towards him! He ran as fast as he could along the path. He looked over his shoulder & saw that the bear was closing on him... He looked over his shoulder again, and the bear was even closer... and then ... He tripped and fell. Rolling over to pick himself up, he found the bear was right on top of him reaching towards him with its left paw and raising the right paw to strike! At that instant the Atheist cried out, 'Oh my God!'

Time Stopped ... The bear froze ... The forest was silent ...

A bright light shone upon the man, and a voice came out of the sky ... "You deny my existence for all these years, you teach others I don't exist and even credit creation to cosmic accident. Do you expect me to help you out of this predicament?" "Am I to count you as a believer?"

The atheist looked directly into the light. "It would be hypocritical of me to suddenly ask you to treat me as a Christian now... but perhaps you could make the BEAR a Christian?"

A pause ...

"Very well," said the voice. The light went out. The sounds of the forest resumed. And the bear dropped his right arm, bowed his head and made the sign of the cross... “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Bless, O Lord, this food which I am about to receive...”

To be a Christian believer is to accept as a central mystery of faith God’s self-revelation as a Triune God. Our God, as revealed through Jesus Christ, is Trinity. Or as the17th century English poet, John Donne, would have it in his Holy Sonnet XIV, “Three-Personed God.” Or better still, as any newly-converted-Christian bear would have it, “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”

Today is Trinity Sunday. The most dreaded Sunday by preachers… because of the daunting task of illuminating the people about this central mystery of Christian faith and because such a task somehow brings the preacher back to those confusing days of classical and metaphysical discussions on the subject from which he managed quite triumphantly a barely passing grade after all the migraine attacks!

Today need not be a migraine day for us. What I would like us to have is an enjoyable way of approaching the mystery of the Trinity and allowing God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit to become a vital force that animates and directs our Christian living and prayer. Allow me then to share with you a way of praying that weaves the fabric of our daily lives into the matrix of our relationship with the Three-Personed God. I call this method “The Three Lovely Moments with God,” a method I’ve learned from my Jesuit spiritual directors. This is fundamentally an Ignatian examen of consciousness with a Trinitarian twist.

Granting that we have found a sacred space where we can enjoy peace and quiet for a few moments, and granting we have assumed a comfortable posture for praying, we begin by asking the grace of God’s presence and enlightenment in the three lovely moments with Him. Then we enter into the three moments.

The first moment is the moment with the Loving Father. In the silence, we go over our lives and, with God’s enlightenment, seek to see where we have experienced the loving presence and action of the Father. To the Father we attribute the beauty and bounty of creation. He is the source of every being and their sustenance. He is our Abba and from him overflows goodness on which we totally depend for our well-being as his children. How have we experienced this goodness and love? Acknowledgment of the significant moments of God’s goodness in our lives leads to a grateful heart. This first moment then is a moment of thanksgiving and praise to a loving God whose Fatherly (for some, Motherly) love sustains us.

The second moment is the moment with the Son. Much as we want to see our lives filled with nothing else but God’s grace, we do see traces of sin that sadly mars our beautiful relationship with God. Sin lurks and strikes like a poisonous scorpion in our most vulnerable moments. But the sting of sin and death has been vanquished by the Son, Jesus Christ, through his passion, death, and resurrection! We can courageously face, then, our moments of weakness and, with tremendous sorrow for having rejected God’s love, turn to Jesus, our Saviour, for the grace of forgiveness, reconciliation, and healing. This second moment therefore is a moment of true repentance and celebration of God’s mercy through the Son, Jesus Christ our Saviour.

The third moment is the moment with the Holy Spirit. The presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives as individual and as a Church is the fulfilment of the Easter promise. The Father and the Son sent the Holy Spirit to abide with us as the Paraclete, our Advocate. He is the Spirit of Truth who guides us to all truth (Jn 16:12). At Pentecost, the Spirit emboldened Jesus’ disciples to preach without fear the Good News to the ends of the earth. The Spirit empowers us and enables us to do what God wills us to do and accomplish that which brings greater glory to God’s name. This third moment then is a time for us to listen to God’s directions. What is God’s invitation for me to do? Do I have plans and projects? Are they mine or God’s? How am I to proceed? In this third moment, we then let the Holy Spirit guide us to the path where God wants us to take. This is the moment of empowerment and direction.

What a lovely life it is that we have as Christians! Baptized “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Mt 28:19), we share in the life of the Trinity. In the second reading (Rom. 8:14-17), Paul explains this sharing in the life of the Trinity as our spiritual adoption by the Father by which we become sons and daughters of God whom we call Abba! This makes us co-heirs with Christ as the Spirit united in our spirit bears witness that we are God’s children. 

Hence our life is a life of intimate relationship with the Triune God. A life dependent on a love that never fails, a life that tends towards perfection through the grace of forgiveness, a life that is directed and empowered to share in God’s creative activity.

This Trinity Sunday then, far from being a dreadful day, is a lovely day... a day to remind us to enjoy the three lovely moments with God as often as we can. Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit!