Trinity and Identity: You Are Not Homo Sapiens
You Are Not “Homo Sapiens”
We gather on this beautiful Sunday to adore God. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, and even with the children crying in the pews, all of creation seems at rest in praise of its Maker. Today the Church sets before us the Holy Trinity. And here is the question this feast presses on us: the Trinity and identity are not separate subjects, because what God is determines what you are.
And yet, whenever it falls to a priest to preach on the Holy Trinity, he struggles. For two thousand years we have approached this mystery from every angle, and we still conclude the same thing: it is a mystery.
Every Analogy for the Trinity Falls Short
There is an old analogy, often attributed to St. Cyril of Jerusalem, that the Holy Trinity is like a flame. You see its light, you feel its heat, you see the flame itself: three different realities, and still one fire. But the image falls short, because a flame has no persons.
St. Patrick would reach instead for the three-leaf clover: one plant, three leaves. Even that falls short, however. God is not made of parts, and the Persons are not parts of God.
When I was in college, we ran a summer camp in a small Mexican town outside my home city of Guadalajara. A group of us worked on the church in the mornings. In the afternoons, we would visit families to share our faith and pray with them. We quickly realized the people were suspicious of us.
At one house, after we knocked, a woman named Maria cracked the door open. She studied how we were dressed and what kind of Bible we carried. Then, a little reluctantly, she let us in. A few weeks earlier, she explained, a wave of missionaries had come through, preaching how illogical it supposedly is to believe in one God in three Persons, citing chapter and verse to prove it.
The whole town had been shaken. She had let two of those missionaries into her home. They quoted verse after verse, and she felt insecure and defensive of her faith: a native Mexican woman without a master’s degree in theology, buried under Scripture references. And so, she admitted, she got upset.
“What did you do?” we asked.
“After fifteen or twenty minutes of them throwing verses at me, I stood up and said: ‘Look, I do not know anything about John 3:16 or Matthew 1:23. About the Trinity, I know very little. But I do know this. I am a mother to my children, a daughter to my parents, and a wife to my husband. I am three and one. And that does not make me three different women, but one woman. So please, leave my house.'”
In a flash of inspiration, Maria had reached for the relational heart of the Trinity. Mother, daughter, wife. Father, Son, and Spirit. And yet even her beautiful image is insufficient. It truly is a mystery.
Why the Church Wrestled Over the Trinity for Centuries
For the first centuries of Christianity, our brothers and sisters argued over a single question: Who is Jesus Christ?Was he true God? He cannot be, some said, because true gods do not die, and they are not born. Was he true man? He cannot be, said others, because men cannot forgive sins the way Jesus claimed the authority to forgive them.
So perhaps, they reasoned, God took possession of Jesus the man at his baptism, and adopted him. Then, when he was about to die and cried out, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” (Mt 27:46), God left him. He died, only to be raised up two or three days later.
We wrestled with these questions for three or four hundred years. After all, it is not obvious on the surface of Scripture that God is triune. This was no abstract quarrel. If Jesus is not true God, then God never truly came in person to save us.
And so the early Church Fathers gathered at the council we call Nicaea, and they prayed and argued through these matters of faith. Some defended one account, some another. In the end, they confessed that Jesus Christ is true God and true man. The word they gave us there endures in our Creed to this day: consubstantial, of one divine “substance” with the Father. The same divine nature of the Father, and of the Spirit, is the nature of the Son.
Now, this mystery is not mathematical. The Church does not ask us to believe that one equals three. Rather, she calls us to something else entirely: to take part, experientially, in this living mystery.
The Trinity and Identity: What You Are Made For
“Father, why does it matter that God is one in three Persons? How is that relevant to my spiritual life, to my very being?”
For one reason above all: what God is determines what you are, and what you are made for.
Science and our culture tell us that our nature is homo sapiens sapiens. You are the one being in nature that thinks and deduces and concludes, and that, they say, is your greatest dignity: “twice wise.” But that is not what Scripture says. In Scripture we hear that God is love (1 Jn 4:8), and in the dynamism of the Trinity we see the very movement of love. So if God is love, and you are made in the image and likeness of God (Gn 1:26), then you were made to love. You carry a trinitarian dimension within you, one we could never have guessed at, and can only know because God revealed himself as Trinity. This is why the faith is finally a relationship with a Person, and not a program of self-improvement.
Baptism Bestows an Identity, Not an Address
In your baptism, you were anointed in the one name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. That was not an address handed to you. It was an identity bestowed upon you. From that moment on, the Trinity inhabits the heart, the mind, and the soul of every baptized believer.
There is a certain drama in this, because the ego must step aside and make room for this greater dignity. For if the Holy Trinity dwells in the hearts of believers, then your life, at its deepest core, is not about you. Instead, it is about this reality taking flesh: Father, Son, and Spirit.
St. Paul says that “God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts” (Gal 4:6). Therefore the Trinity is no longer outside you. You are not knocking at the doors of the divine nature, begging for an audience with the Father, the Son, or the Spirit. In a soul in the state of grace, the Trinity dwells within the believer. Once you grasp how tightly the Trinity and identity are bound together, everything begins to look different.
A few days ago, I saw one of those memes from the fitness and mindfulness world, drawing a line between discipline and devotion. Discipline, it said, is the imperative: you have to do this. It is a matter of the ego. Devotion is different: I want to do this. It is a matter of the heart. There is real truth there, and it maps onto the life of the Trinity.
From “I Have To” to “I Get To”
So there are things in our lives we feel we have to do, and things we come to see we get to do.
- You do not have to pray because you once made a resolution to. You get to have the Holy Spirit of your Lord praying within you, to the Father, in the Son.
- You do not have to go to the gym. You get to be a good steward of your body and mind, to enjoy life and exercise.
- You do not have to suffer through temptation. You get to love something greater than your passions.
- You do not have to come home and play with your children after a long day, or show up for your spouse. You get to love as a father, as a mother, as a sibling. You get to enjoy the gift of life.
- You do not have to come to Mass. You get to offer the praise and worship of your whole life within the very movement of the Trinity. You get to share in the mystery of the Son offering himself to the Father in the Holy Spirit. Notice how trinitarian the Mass is: addressed to the Father, the sacrifice of the Son, in his Holy Spirit. And we are part of that.
- You do not have to suffer the pains of illness, of grief, of loss. You get to, in the words of St. Paul, “fill up in your body what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ” (Col 1:24). You get to offer your suffering for the salvation of souls.
So our life is not about us. There is a greater dynamism at work, in our psychology and our spirit, yes, but also in our families and our workplaces.
The Oldest Prayer to the Holy Trinity: The Sign of the Cross
I would like to close with an invitation to pray, using a prayer as old as the doctrine of the Trinity itself. We say it so often that we forget its power. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
That Sign of the Cross is a prayer to the Trinity, in the one name of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. We trace it over our mind, our heart, and our shoulders. Indeed, it is the most powerful of prayers, because in it we call to mind our baptism and our divine nature (Mt 28:19).
Make this prayer often. Sign yourself as you begin your work, to sanctify that work as an offering to the Father, in the Son, through the Holy Spirit. On your way home, about to step back into family life, sign yourself again, so that this too may be prayer. When you struggle through temptation and weakness, make the sign with devotion, remembering that even the struggle has a purpose within the life of the Trinity. Bless yourself before sleep, commending your heart to the heavenly Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit. Before meals, trace the prayer on your children’s foreheads. Bless your elderly parents. Bless even your enemies.
This prayer of the Trinity activates the very power of our baptism in daily life. It is how we begin every sacramental prayer, how we begin the Mass, and above all how we make ourselves present to the very sacrifice of the Son, offered to the Father, in the Holy Spirit.
So pray it with devotion. Be mindful of every gesture and every word, aware that you are calling to mind the very Trinity who dwells in your heart, your body, and your soul by the grace of your baptism. You will be amazed at what happens when the ego steps aside and recognizes this beautiful Presence of God, distinct in each of his Persons. Everything in your life begins to change. Even your suffering, and even your joys, take on greater meaning.
Remember that you were made for this divine communion. Perhaps the truest definition of the human being is not homo sapiens sapiens, the creature who thinks, but homo amans, the creature of love. Because our Lord loved us first, we are capable of loving in every moment and every circumstance of our lives.
Remember that you were made for this divine communion. And every single day, you get to be a part of it.
St. Peter, prince of the Apostles, pray for us.
