TRINTY SUNDAY

I remember one year, when I was struggling to know what to say on Trinity Sunday, turning in desperation to a book which summarised what theologians have said about the Trinity over the centuries. And what I found there left me, I remember, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. And so I would like to do what I did then and quote you a sentence from the opening paragraph.

“A commonplace of contemporary Trinitarian theology is the priority it grants to the narrative and symbolic discourse of Christian worship and proclamation over the leaner, conceptual discourse of theological theory itself. Theology continues to employ conceptual forms of thought in probing the meaning of Trinity, but deepened appreciation of the more spontaneous discourse of lived Christian praxis suggests a more conscious subordination of Trinitarian theory to what might be called the ‘semantic aim’ of Christian proclamation and worship.”

And believe me, there’s plenty more where that came from, centuries more; tome after tome of big words and complicated sentences causing countless library shelves to groan under their weight. And yet, even if we read them all, we would be no closer to understanding the mystery of the Trinity. As St Thomas Aquinas, whose own writings run to many volumes, famously said:, ‘Everything I have ever written turned to straw compared with what I learned in one moment of contemplation.’ And St Ignatius of Loyola says something very similar about an experience he had one day beside the River Cardoner in Manresa, not far from Barcelona. Recalling it years later in Rome, he wrote that if he added together everything he had learned about God in the whole course of his life it was not as much as he learned at that one moment. So what do they mean?

Well, the first things they are saying – an idea you should be familiar with by now – is that nothing we say about God is ever completely true. Human language is just not capable of describing God. We have neither the vocabulary nor the concepts to do so. We can say that God is love. We can say that God is Father. But the words ‘Love’ and ‘Father’ can only be applied to God by analogy and will always be only partly true, and partly untrue, something which has immense implications for what it means to be people of faith in the world today. And the key is in the Eucharistic Prayer we use each Sunday.

In it, we ask God to “keep us alert in faith to the signs of the times, eager to accept the challenge of the Gospel and open to the needs of all humanity so that, by sharing in the struggles of the men and women of our time, we may faithfully bring them the good news of salvation and advance together with them on the way to the Kingdom.” But one of the main signs of the times we are living through – and therefore the place where we will meet God - is the phenomenon some call loss of faith but which is, in fact, something much more profound than that? Millions in the modern world have rejected the idea of God as we have understood it up to now. It no longer makes any sense to them and there are good reasons why. The seeds were planted in the days of Galileo when we discovered that we were not the centre of the universe. Later, when Darwin announced that, instead of being the pinnacle of God’s creation, we were actually descended from apes, that dented our sense of who we are even more. And what has exacerbated all this and brought it to a head has been the incredible development of science and technology over the last hundred years. The rate and depth of change has been phenomenal and the failure of Religion to respond adequately to this new world, resisting it rather than embracing it, has left us looking like dinosaurs to millions, relics of bye-gone pre-scientific age dominated by superstition and magic. So what do we do about it? How do we respond to this great sign of the times?

Well, we can weep and wail, looking around for someone or something to blame. Those who do this tend to retreat further and further into ways of thinking which are long past their sell-by date, hanging on, like children with a comfort blanket, to ideas and practices which no longer respond to the world we live in. And there is lots of this around, as instead of doing what the liturgy says and being alert to the signs of the times, eager to accept the challenge of the Gospel, we seek refuge in a past which no longer exists. Often the reason we do this is that we are afraid to look too closely at the questions being raised by those who no longer believe in God; in case what they say is true; in case there is no God; in case he is no more than a projection of our own need for a father figure; It’s as if our own grasp on faith is so tenuous that we are afraid to even look at it in case it turns to dust.

But there’s another way, the only really genuine response for those who are called to be a priestly people in the midst of the world. And it is to enter, like Jesus, deeply into the situation the men and women of our time are living through. It is to face up to and feel their questions in our own bodies. It is to experience their doubts. It is to experience in ourselves the atheism of our age, neither falling into its trap nor retreating into the false security of explanations which were only ever partly true. To believe in God today is to live with the constant possibility that he may not exist. To pray is to enter into clouds of unknowing and, as I do every day in life, take the risk that the God we pray to is no more than our own voice echoing in the darkness. That’s the nature of the age we live in and we can only be bearers of the Good News to such a world if we are willing to walk in its shoes, feel its doubts and enter into its struggles.

God cannot be understood. God can only be worshipped. Our vocation is to be signs of that for the people of our time and, in the midst of all the confusion and uncertainty, continue, on behalf of all around us to pray those ancient words: Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be world without end. Amen.

BIDDING PRAYERS

For many, the age through which we are living is a threatening one, stirring fears and anxieties about the widespread loss of faith in God which we see around us. And yet, for men and women of faith, there is nothing to fear. The key is to understand what is happening. When we do this, the situation is transformed. Instead of being frightening, it becomes a challenge, a great opportunity, and invitation to deeper faith. And so we pray for the wisdom we need to see it in this way…….Lord hear us

During a time of confusion and rapid change, the likes of which we are living through at this moment in history, there will always be casualties. Many good people, influenced by but unable to understand the roots and causes of modern atheistic ways of thinking, have lost their faith in the very existence of God or had it seriously undermined. And so we pray for them today, that this often painful experience will become the place where they meet God again in new and much deeper way........Lord hear us

Many today complain that they cannot pray the way they used to, and, discouraged by this experience, give up trying. And yet the experience of not being able to pray as we used to is very often a sign that the way we used to pray is no longer appropriate and that God is calling us to different ways of praying. Prayer is a great journey which takes us through many stages and we ask for the grace to keep travelling until we finally meet the one true God face to face and see him for who he really is.........Lord hear us

Tradition, one of the pillars of Catholicism, has been described as the living faith of the dead; traditionalism, on the other hand, as the dead faith of the living. And so we pray for all who are trapped in the past, floundering around in a world which no longer exists except in their own minds, that they will have the courage they need to engage with a modern Church in a modern world and so become a truly priestly people for the sake of the men and women who share this moment in history with us.........Lord hear us.

We pray in a particular way for the children and young people of our parish. For many of them, the world of faith seems alien and of little or no relevance to their lives. We pray, however, that the efforts we are making to develop a programme of religious education suited to their needs will, in time, help them grow into men and women of faith able to take their rightful place in the Church as it works out how to be faithful to Jesus’ command to make disciples of all the nations in the world of the 21th Century.........Lord hear us

In today’s Gospel, Jesus promises that the Spirit will lead us into the complete truth. Created in the image and likeness of God and blessed with intelligence, we can explore and unravel many of the great mysteries of creation, a process which is accelerating rapidly in our own time. But there are truths hidden from even the greatest minds. These, like the mystery we celebrate this weekend, can only be known through faith. And we ask God to pour that faith into the world at this moment in its history.....Lord hear us