Today we celebrate the Solemnity of the Holy Trinity, and what is perhaps one of the most foundational (and, at the same time, difficult to grasp) mysteries of our Faith. It is foundational because it describes the very being of our God, and it is difficult to grasp because we have such limited capacity to grasp the triune nature of our God since it is so fundamentally different from our own.
We worship one God, He who is without any of the limitations of the fabric of this universe as we understand it. He is present everywhere at once, He is without limit to his power, He is eternal and does not see time in the linear and limited fashion that we as mortal beings do, and He is love incarnate in the perfection of its form, presentation, and purity. Lastly, He is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit all. He exists as one God who is fully manifested in each of these three persons of the Trinity, all at once, and all equal. As I said at the beginning, this can be difficult for us to grasp. Each of us is one person, one presence, one mindset, encapsulated in one body for the duration of our short lives. We move through space and time within the limitations of a physical existence, and yet, our nature is not merely relegated to this kind of existence. Our spiritual selves are actually beyond that. Just as Jesus spoke of the nature of the movement of the wind when speaking with Nicodemus about life in the Spirit, and to demonstrate the difference in perceptions, so we too can perceive things beyond our physical form and have a chance to come to an understanding that would be impossible for a purely physical being.
Our Father has always existed as a father for us and has worked for and within us through His Spirit, and through the intervention of His Son. His Son is completely begotten of Him, and so shares His nature perfectly, and yet was willing to take our form for a while to allow us to better understand Him who is our God. He knew full well that for us to truly become intimate with Him we needed to be able to get that close in our full physical selves, and then by virtue of His guidance and the Spirit be able to grasp the words of the Son and take them to heart. What is more, the Son came to give all of Himself in a way that could only be accomplished through a physical presence, because the nature of the perfect sacrifice of the Lamb, could only be accomplished by His dying on the cross in a physical body that suffered and died in the perfect unity to our own way of suffering and death in our physical bodies. The key difference is that while He suffered and died with us in perfect unity, He then moved beyond that on the third day, because there was no way that death could continue to grasp at His true nature. His death was there only because He allowed it to happen, and His resurrection was the conclusion of that event that then allows each of us to hope, because of our more significant presence as beings who are also of spirit, and so can be raised through this part of ourselves and be brought back to life in the eternal, in a more glorified form than we can grasp in our present state.
Our God comes to us in perfection of form depending upon our needs. He is made known to us in the Father when we need the guiding hand of a parent, as the Son when we need to be close to and hold the hand of our Brother as we become more familiar with Him and learn from Him, and He is present with us each day of our lives through His spirit working within us, and providing us with knowledge and wisdom if we are open to hearing it. He is with us perfectly in the ways that are needed to allow us to move through a life with the complete freedom and dignity of a truly free will, and yet not without the love that is always felt toward us.
The Deacons Bench 