Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Aidan Owen, OHC
Trinity Sunday A - Sunday, July 2, 2023
.Love.Today, the Feast of the Holy Trinity, is a celebration of the overflowing love at the heart of all life, of the love that is itself life and is, at the same time, the engine and fuel of life.
Over the last few weeks, during Ascensiontide and on to Pentecost, we have heard those exquisite passages from John’s gospel in which Jesus tells his disciples of the intimacy he shares with the Father, an intimacy the Spirit will draw them and us into. It is an intimacy both tender and expansive.
All that the Father has is mine, Jesus says. And when the Spirit comes, she will give all that I have to you.
It is of this intimacy, the indwelling of one with another, that Paul writes when he says that “When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.”
It isn’t that we weren’t the children of God before Christ. But if we are made new in Christ, then we possess everything of God, for as the letter to the Colossians puts it in Christ are “hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” Take that in for a moment. In Christ you and I possess everything of God.
All that the Father has is mine, and in the Spirit, all that I have is yours. May they be one, Father, as you and I are one.
The Father pours herself into the Son, who again pours herself into the Spirit, who again pours herself into you and me and the River and the trees. One in another.
This self-emptying love of one for another neither overwhelms nor subsumes our identity. Instead, this self-emptying love completes our identity and confirms it.
When we surrender to this love, flowing into and through our lives, we become more fully who we are, not less. We become more distinctly ourselves, at the same time that we become more transparent.
Five years ago tomorrow I was ordained a priest in this very church (in the Monastery’s church just down the hill). As many of you know, I’m somewhat skeptical by nature, and I don’t have a very high clericalism. I honestly didn’t believe that I would be different after that liturgy. But I was wrong.
I prostrated myself before the bishop and the altar as we sang the ancient hymn to the Holy Spirit: “O Come Creator Spirit Come, and make within our hearts your home.”
I found that I couldn’t sing the words of the hymn. I was too overcome with emotion, and I began to cry as intensely as I ever have. But by the third or fourth verse, I had dropped down below the emotion, into a place of total stillness.
As the bishop laid his hands on my head and prayed for God to make me a priest, I had the strongest sense that I was being given back a piece of myself that I hadn’t known was missing. And, at the same time, I was being given as a gift to the church and the world. Not that my ministry was being given, but that I, the substance of me, all of me was being given as a gift.
This is how love works in and through us. In God’s mercy, we are completed and filled, given first to ourselves as pure gift, and then poured out as a balm for the world.
The comingling of gift and self-offering, of fullness and emptiness, is the flow at the heart of divine love. It is how God first created all that is—by pouring out her substance into matter—“the prodigal, squandering herself” to paraphrase Karl Rahner. It is how Jesus redeemed the world, first being given the gift of himself at his baptism, and then consenting to the pouring out of his life in love on the Cross. And it is how the Spirit makes us children of God—by first returning us to ourselves and then enabling us to empty the Self of selves in service to the world.
Bruno Barnhart and Carl Jung both believed that three was an incomplete number and that it would be more accurate to speak of the Holy Quaternity than the Holy Trinity. The Godhead, three in one and one in three, is not complete without the Fourth: you and me.
The love that flows from and is God is not quite whole without us. And here’s the rub.
What would it mean to consent to full and total immersion in the heart of love? Who would we become if we fully consented to God’s living presence within us? What would it mean for there truly to be no separation between us and God? Fully heirs with Christ to everything that belongs to the Father, which is to say, to absolutely everything.
We would be like a house with the roof blown off so the stars could shine in her depths.
In one of her last poems, Denise Levertov explores the power of desire to draw us more deeply into God:
Augustine said his soul
was a house so cramped
God could barely squeeze in.
Knock down the mean partitions,
he prayed, so You may enter!
Raise the oppressive ceilings! […]
Nevertheless,
it’s clear desire
fulfilled itself in the asking, revealing prayer’s
dynamic action, that scoops out channels
like water on stone, or builds like layers
of grainy sediment steadily
forming sandstone. The walls, with each thought,
each feeling, each word he set down,
expanded, unnoticed; the roof
rose, and a skylight opened.
We really don’t know how to pray as we ought. We don’t know how to surrender our lives, to empty ourselves so that God can fill us full again. But we don’t have to know. It’s enough to want it, or to want to want it. It’s enough to throw our desire to wind, to open our arms wide in supplication. God knows that the deepest desire of our hearts is for God. And God wants us to know that her deepest desire is for us, too. We already have the one we love most fully. Though our lives often feel like a house too cramped, our souls dwell in vast meadows under a sky of stars. Sometimes, thank God, the Spirit clues us into this reality among and within us. And when the house of our soul begins to close in on us again, we can reach out with our love for God, push out the walls and the ceilings, and punch a hole to the sky once more. Because God is good, and that is everything.
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