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I'm Sure You All Know the Story of the Great Doctor of the Church, Saint

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I'm Sure You All Know the Story of the Great Doctor of the Church, Saint I’m sure you all know the story of the great Doctor of the Church, Saint Augustine of Hippo, who spent over 30 years writing his book on the Holy Trinity, trying to conceive an explanation of the mystery of the Trinity. One day he was walking by the seashore trying to understand the mystery of the Holy Trinity when he saw a young boy running back and forth from the water to a place in the sand. He saw the boy was using a seashell to carry water from the ocean to a small hole he had dug in the sand. He asked the boy what he was doing and the boy told him he was trying to bring all the sea into his little hole. Saint Augustine told him it was impossible, that the little hole could not hold all the water. The boy stopped his work and said to him, “It is no more impossible than what you are trying to do – comprehend the immensity of the mystery of the Holy Trinity with your small intelligence.” At that, the boy disappeared. The Holy Trinity is indeed a mystery and trying to fit it all into our little heads is indeed impossible. But to say that the Trinity is a mystery is not to say that we cannot understand it at all. It just means that we can’t understand all of it. So let’s look at that from both ends. From one perspective, we can understand something of the mystery. Indeed Saint Augustine himself spilled much ink trying to explain aspects of what it means for God to be Trinity. I’ve explained to you before his analogy of love: God the Father, the lover, eternally pours himself out to the Son. God the Son eternally receives the gift of the Father, and eternally returns the gift of himself to the Father. Their exchange of life and love is so real, that it itself is another divine person, the Holy Spirit. So in the Holy Trinity you have everything that is necessary for love. This is only one example of an explanation. There are others. So on the one hand God desires us to understand Him and to some extent we can begin at least to glimpse with our brains what it means for God to be Trinity. On the other hand, we can never understand it all. Since the mystery of the Trinity is infinite and we are finite beings, we can never take it all in. However, at some point it is important for us to move from understanding to beholding. At our time in history, this is a difficult move intellectually. Our brains are conditioned, are taught, to be rational, logical, scientific, systematic. And there’s a place for all that. It’s what has made us so successful with machines and technology. But as we contemplate the mystery of the Trinity, God bids us to move deeper than just trying to analyze Him. We must behold Him. We must see with the eyes of our souls how beautiful God is. Indeed, God is not just beautiful, God is beauty. We contemplate the beauty which is God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. One God in three persons. To behold Him in this way is to love Him, to adore Him, to want to give ourselves to His mystery, and it is to allow our hearts and minds to be filled with the goodness, beauty and love of God. In heaven, our beholding of God will be perfect, but even now, assisted by the Holy Spirit, we can contemplate the mystery of the Holy Trinity, not by trying rationally to understand the mystery (although there is a place for that), but by simply allowing ourselves to behold the mystery of God. And ironically by beholding the mystery of God we come to a deeper kind of understanding of that mystery. At this point are you saying to yourselves “What in the world is he talking about?” Simply: when you pray, ask God to show Himself to you, and in prayer God will grant you moments when it is enough for you to be still, simply to look at the beauty of God. This is what it means to behold the mystery of the Holy Trinity. Given by Father Mark Gurtner at Our Lady of Good Hope Catholic Church, Fort Wayne, Indiana, on the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, 2014. .
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