The doctrine that changes everything

This Trinity Sunday, we ask what relevance this strange doctrine of the Trinity has for Christian life. Is it simply an abstract formula? Or can it shape everything about how we live and see the faith?

Being in love

There are some things you can’t go back from. Some things so revolutionise your way of seeing the world that it leaves behind something indelible, something unforgettable.

One of those things, for me, was properly seeing for the first time the significance of the doctrine of the Trinity. I began to see it as something that shaped not only the fact and purpose of my existence, but also my relationship to the Church and the sacraments. With guidance from one particular theologically minded person, I began to see my relationship to the Trinity as one of being in love (although not with the connotations that phrase has today).

C.S. Lewis put his finger on it best in his novel The Great Divorce (1945), an allegorical tale about a bus ride from hell to heaven. The narrator of the story finds himself amongst a busload of people being flown from Grey Town (hell) to a beautiful country (heaven) in which they encounter people from their life on earth who try to convince them to enter Heaven instead of returning to Grey Town – a loveless, lonely and joyless place. One of the people shown to the narrator is a woman talking with her former lover. She, on the one hand, is radiant and beautiful. The man, on the other hand, has been split in two by bitterness and has become the ghost of a dwarf and a tall tragedian chained together.

During their conversation, the woman merely mentions the word love and the man reacts:

‘Love! Do you know the meaning of the word?

‘How should I not?’ said the Lady. ‘I am in love. In love, do you understand? Yes, now I love truly . . . I am in Love Himself, not lonely. Strong, not weak. You shall be the same. Come and see.’

Much ink has been spilled trying to articulate the mystery of the Trinity. As always with Lewis, in very few words he captures something people have written entire books about – the mystery of the Trinity, as a mystery of love, is one into which our very being is swept.

Sacramental mysticism

Fulton Sheen had it right: the Holy Spirit is the ‘breath of love’ that passes between the Father and the Son, a love so intimate, so powerful, so real that it is a living Person. What this means, though, is that through the gift of the Holy Spirit – given first in the Sacrament of Baptism and then renewed through Confirmation – we are brought into the inner life of that Trinity. We live, here and now, in Love itself.

Pope Benedict XVI, in his encyclical Deus Caritas Est, talks about this as a ‘sacramental mysticism’, because through the Eucharist in particular ‘we enter into the very dynamic of [God’s] self-giving’ (§13). It is this revelation that ‘God is love’ (1 John 4:16) that distinguishes Christianity from every other creed and philosophy; it is what makes being a Christian more than ‘the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea’ (§1).

God is not an isolated being who remains at a distance from us. Not only does he reveal his inner life to us but he invites us into that inner life; as St Peter writes in one of his letters, God lets us “share the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4).

When St John says that we should “abide in love”, that’s another way of saying that we should let ourselves be in Love; to walk and dwell in that mystery of Love that is here and now.

What this means is that the doctrine of the Trinity is not just an abstract formula with no relevance to the everyday Christian life. In fact, as Darrell W. Johnson has pointed out in his book Experiencing the Trinity, what it means is that when we love somebody we are not simply loving that person of our own volition and by our own means. No, in choosing to love we are choosing to participate in the Love that God already has for that person.

Making sense of things

At the heart of everything in Catholicism is the mystery of the Trinitarian God and the Love into which he draws us. Understanding this helps to illuminate other elements of the faith, from the Eucharist to the communion of saints, and even the need for the Church to be a visible, social communion. Catholicism is not simply an invitation to fall in love, but to be and remain in Love Himself.