Well, we move into so called Ordinary Time, but the next two Sundays have feasts not from the Gospel life of Christ but rather from our theological journey. They are about who we understand God to be and the glory of Christ in the Eucharist; Trinity and Corpus et Sanguinis Christi.
The Feast of the Trinity invites us to contemplate the reality of God in and of “him”self. There is a wonderful Greek word used to help us enter into this interrelationship of the three in one God, percichoresis! (yup, you heard it here first folks!) It means the dance (from where we get the word terpsicpore). The Father’s love for the Son and the Son’s love for the Father is so intertwined and so active it is like a dance, and their Holy Spirit pours out from this dance which would not work one without the other. Remember that this is an analogy because we are trying to understand mystery in its most profound form, God.
God has a life within “him”self, this is called the Immanent Trinity and a life that connects with creation which is called the Economic Trinity; this does not mean trading or fiscal economics, but the interface between the utterly other God and how “He” communicates with us. We cannot fathom the former, just contemplate it and adore it, but we can and must relate to the latter Economic Trinity. This is at the heart of the Year of Mercy. Pope Francis refers to this as God revealing himself to us with the Face of Mercy. The Immanent Trinity is omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, etc and these characteristics are marvelous but beyond our full comprehension. But the characteristic that we can and must appreciate and respond to in imitation is that God revealed his infinity mercy to us in Jesus Christ. Our relationship with God is response to his mercy and we must pass this on to all we meet along life’s byways. So today we give glory to God for the mystery that he is and give thanksgiving for revealing himself to us through the mercy of Jesus Christ.
You may wonder why I have put “He” or “Him’ in inverted commas. God has no sex or, rather, is all sex. We use Father and Son because we are limited in language. But it is interesting that the first mention of God in Genesis 1.1 is the “Spirit of God hovering over the void”; this word for Spirit in Hebrew Ruach also means breath and in Hebrew the word is…feminine! There you go girls, our first notion of God is as a “she”!
God bless you, your families, and the week ahead.
May God bless you, your families, and the week ahead,
Fr Aidan Peter