John 3:16-18

God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him will not be condemned, but whoever does not believe has already been condemned, becaue he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.

Today, May 31, is the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity.

The Holy Trinity is the first article of Catholic faith. The existence of God is not an article of Catholic faith, because we can know that God exists through rational thinking. Faith is what we believe about the God whose existence reason demonstrates. We know that God exists. We believe that God is a Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The standard formula for speaking of the relationship between the Persons of the Trinity is to speak of them as: three Persons in one divine Being. Why Persons? Because they are distinct from each other. The Father is not the Son. The Son is not the Spirit. The Spirit is not the Father. A Person is someone rather than something. A Person has His own center of consciousness, is capable of relating to others, and is capable of loving others. We see in the Scriptures how the Persons of the Holy Trinity relate to each other, perhaps most especially at the Baptism of Jesus, where the Father speaks of His beloved Son and the Holy Spirit appears as a dove over Jesus. Yet the all share the same divine Nature. God’s Nature is what He is. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are who God is.

God is love. In order to have love, you need at least two people: a lover and a beloved. In the Holy Trinity, the Father is the Lover, the Son is the Beloved, and the love they share is so real, it is itself it’s own Person: the Holy Spirit. This is why marriage is such an apt analogy for the Holy Trinity: you have the husband, the lover; you have the wife, the beloved; and every once in a while the love between them becomes so real that we have to give it a name: Robert, Margaret, George, Kathy, etc.

The Church Fathers spoke of the love shared by the Persons of the Holy Trinity as a perichoresis, or an eternal dance of divine love. The promise of Jesus for those who follow Him and remain faithful to Him to the end is that we will be caught up in that eternal dance of divine love. This is what it means to be saved: to be caught up in the dance!

Nothing on Earth is worth giving up the dance. Follow Jesus. Remain faithful to Jesus. Don’t give up the dance.

Be Christ for all. Bring Christ to all. See Christ in all.