We Are Relationship — Trinity Sunday, June 3 to 9, 2012 (Ninth Week of “Ordinary Time”)

To live as the “risen Christ,” we must live as Father, Son and Spirit interacting with each other. Does that sound complicated?

It should. God is “mystery” — not truth that is unknowable but Truth so “infinitely,” “boundlessly” knowable that it “invites endless exploration.” The key to knowing God (and ourselves as created in the image of God plus sharing his own divine life by grace) is to explore how in God “Being Itself” is the reality of Three Persons who, though One in nature, differ from each other by the way they interact. That is, by relationship. What makes the Father “Father” is his interaction with the Son and Spirit. The Son is “Son” (or “Word”) because of his unique relationship with the Father and Spirit. The Spirit is “Spirit” because of his special interaction with the Father and Son. (Notice we are using “relationship” and “interaction” interchangeably). That is about as clear as light so blinding you can’t look at it, but it does give us something to work with. In a nutshell, the key to personal “be-ing” is relating, interacting. We are persons, and create ourselves as the persons we are becoming, by the way we “relate” — that is, interact — with others. To “be” is to relate, interact.

Did they teach us that in religion class?

Actually, they did. The Great Commandment is the rule for interacting with God: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with your whole heart....” And all the other Commandments are ways of expressing love in our interactions with people. Check this out: go through them, seeing each one in this light. It is enlightening.

The Responsorial invites us to know God by focusing on his interaction with us: “Blessed the people the Lord has chosen to be his own.” So does the first reading: "Ask now... Did anything so great ever happen before?... Did a people ever hear the voice of God... as you did, and live?” And the second: “You received a Spirit of adoption... The Spirit himself bears witness....”

The Gospel tells us how, as the risen body of Jesus, we need to interact with others: “Go, therefore, and make disciples....” This means to bring others into participating in the divine interaction that is the life of God: “...baptizing them in the name of the Father,

and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

To live as a human is to interact with others. To live as Christ is to interact with the Father as the Son does, and with both Father and Son by the unitive, “joining” power of the Holy Spirit. To interact with others by “the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ” is to let the Son in us express to them the ‘love of the Father,” drawing every person we deal with into “communion in the Holy Spirit.”

To live is to be caught up in the life of the Three Persons going on inside of us — in their relationships, their interaction — and to interact in the same ways with other people.

This might sound a little mystical, but that is what our graced, divine-human life is: a mystery that invites “endless exploration.”

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