Clergy Notes — Trinity Sunday, May 26, 2024

I love the prayer from St. Catherine of Siena (in this week’s Reflection), which captures for me exactly how I love best to imagine the divine: passionate, mysterious, and eternal; fiery yet deeply nurturing; perfect, uncompromising truth and endless compassion. It somehow manages to retain the personal aspect of God we humans yearn for and yet retains the ineffable, unsearchable quality of the divine which can never be described or pinned down.

There is a tendency on Trinity Sunday to either try and explain the Trinity or dodge that impossible task altogether by simply saying, “It is a mystery!” I think neither are quite sufficient. I’ve said before that I believe mystery and paradox are how God seduces us into relationship; we know we will never find all the answers and yet we are compelled to keep searching; it is a perpetual dance of knowing and unknowing; intimacy and mystery – its purpose, ultimately, to keep us in relationship with the One who loves us so passionately.

Relationship, therefore, really is the key to contemplating the Trinity. In St. Catherine’s poem, I believe she nails it when she says, “You had no need of us, for your Godhead is full and overflowing” and also, “You, who are madly in love with your creatures.” This so beautifully explains the tension that we encounter when we wrestle with the judgement of God vs. the mercy of God. There is no “Old Testament God” and “New Testament God” – there is only ONE God; one ancient, eternal, powerfully complex God who is so far beyond our understanding we could never even draw near of our own accord, but who also longs for us more deeply than we can ever comprehend. The only possible way to respond is with our own longing, and with awe that we are invited to do so.

Mother Amanda

Download the Liturgy at Home booklet for Sunday, May 26, 2024.