Why don't I make sense on my own?

Homily

Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity

25 May 2024

St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas

AMDG

Why don't I make sense on my own?

Life sure would be easier if I could just figure things out by myself.  Relationships are hard, messy and costly.  There's always the temptation to make things easier for myself, and to go it alone by maximizing my privacy and choice and control, to get life managed to a point where I'm not so afraid of it.

Yet this isn't the path that leads to who God is, and so it's not the path that leads ultimately to life.

From the beginning of my story, I am told that it is not good for me to be alone.  But I'll be damned if it's not tempting.  Jesus is my savior precisely because He won't leave me alone.  He doesn't know how to lose someone, or give up on me.  He comes to restore integrity, unity, relationship and communion to all creation, and most personally to me.  Even when Jesus went to the edge of God-forsakeness to rescue me, He knew his mission was not to end in isolation and death, but in communion and in life.

Today's solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity answers the question of why I don't make sense by myself.  Today's Solemnity is a celebration of ultimate truth, that God in His deepest nature is a communion of persons in love with each other.  Through differentiation, each of the three is free to will the good of another, yet this love is so consistent and complete that it simultaneously and always arrives at a single shared reality, the very source of all unity.  You know the theological formula. God is both three and one, in a complementary way not in a competitive or confounding one.

So what?  What difference does the revelation of this ultimate truth mean for me?  Well, I propose that there can be no more intimate, personal, important and yes, even practical truth for your life, than the definition of the most Holy Trinity. For what is most true of God is precisely the most life-giving and freeing truth for you, for in case you weren't paying attention, you are made in the image of the Most Holy Trinity, and through baptism, you are a child destined to grow in the likeness of these three persons - Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

I become what I worship. There can be nothing more true of the human experience, even moreso than I become what I eat, or what I choose, or who my friends are.  These other truths of human nature are mere corollaries of the truth of the Most Holy Trinity.  I can make an argument then, and indeed I do, that how I worship today the deepest mystery and truth of our faith, is most determinative of who I am and who I will become.

I become what I worship most of all, and if I dare to worship ultimate truth, I worship precisely what is necessarily and practically and urgently true for me.

What is this most necessary truth that anytime I worship it, sets me free to love and live and fulfill my destiny?  It's as simple as the Trinity.  Just like the Trinity, I do not make sense on my own.  Instead, because I have first been loved into existence, I am gifted with a freedom to consistently will the good of another, and in so doing I enter fully into reality and into a life that cannot and will not be destroyed by death.

You can explore all the self-help and self-care ways to get healthy all you want, and never arrive as a more compelling, life-giving, important and practical truth than the truth of the Most Holy Trinity, a truth that transforms us when we worship it, especially today.

Simple enough, right?  Yet there's a catch.  Because I am also fallen, what I am meant to most put my  faith in, is also the most fearful thing for me and the thing I will most doubt.  Moses described why we have to worship God, because no people or religion has ever had a God reveal so fully who He is by crashing into our history, in the past and even now, through awesome signs and wonders and terrors. When God reveals who He is and who I am, I get scared, and even as I worship, I doubt.

Yet the love that casts our fear is precisely who God is, and precisely what and why I worship today.  In the very face of my doubts, there is the immense freedom available at Mass to imitate God, and by being free to will the good of another, arrive at the grace of a shared communion of love that is the source of eternal life.  No one enters fully into life, except through the mystery of who God is, the mystery that I worship today.

I wouldn't have ever figured out the true meaning of life on my own, and why I don't make sense of my own.  Praise God that through the revelation of this awesome mystery, I don't have to and I no longer want to.

+mj