Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Aidan Owen, OHC
Trinity Sunday- Sunday, May 27, 2018
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 Pentecost, we 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 so tender that it’s almost painful.
All that the Father has is mine, he 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 came. But if we are made new in Christ, then we possess everything of God. Take that in for a moment.
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. No, this self-emptying love completes our identity. Confirms it.
When we surrender to this love, flowing into and through our lives, we become more fully who we are, not less. More distinctly ourselves, at the same time that we become more transparent.
In November I was ordained a deacon. 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 knelt before the bishop as the assembly sang the ancient hymn to the Holy Spirit: “O Come Creator Spirit Come, and make within our hearts your home. Come to create, renew, inspire…”
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. By the third or fourth verse, I had dropped down below the emotion, into a place of utter stillness and peace.
As the bishop laid his hands on my head and prayed for God to make me a deacon in her church, I had the strongest sense that I was being given back a piece of myself I hadn’t known was missing. And, at the same time, that 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. This invitation to the heart of love terrifies us. What would it mean to consent to full and total immersion in the heart of love? Who would we become? 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 are like the narrator of George Herbert’s great poem:
Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back Guilty of dust and sin.But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack From my first entrance in,Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,If I lacked any thing.
A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:Love said, You shall be he.I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,I cannot look on thee.Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,Who made the eyes but I?
Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shameGo where it doth deserve.And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?My dear, then I will serve.You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:So I did sit and eat.
(George Herbert, “Love III”)
The table is laid, every moment the feast of Love calls to us. Fearful, skeptical, tired as we often are, if are ever to be whole, we must sit down and taste Love’s meat. We must sit and eat.
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