475. The Blessed Trinity (I)

Meditations no. 218 (unofficial computer-aided translation)

We should hold a constant conversation with God, One and Three, who dwells in our soul in grace.

We have now received the Holy Spirit whom Jesus promised to his Church. The time has come for us to consider in a new light the most amazing of all God’s revelations: the Blessed Trinity, the three divine Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In contemplating and rejoicing in the Blessed Trinity, we find the fullness of Christian life.

Through St Peter’s teaching we have discovered that the three divine Persons have played a part in transforming us, and continue to do so. We know that we are chosen and destined by God the Father and sanctified by the Spirit for obedience to Jesus Christ and for sprinkling with his blood. And this fires us with the desire to worship the Blessed Trinity. Our hearts overflow with praise, and today we begin to say, together with everyone else in the Work, the Angelic Trisagium, which we pray during the three days up to and including the feast of the Blessed Trinity. We want to repeat for ever, with the whole Church: Tibi laus, Tibi gloria, Tibi gratiarum actio in saecula sempiterna, O Beata Trinitas! To you, O Blessed Trinity, be praise and honour and thanksgiving, for ever and ever!

We want to draw close to the Triune God, getting to know him and being filled with the sweetness of his abiding presence. In our desire to savour this new experience, which changes our whole world, we are no longer satisfied simply with contemplating God in his essential Unity: we want to love him and adore him in the Trinity of the divine Persons.

Address each person of the Blessed Trinity in turn, our Father recommended, and repeat without fear: I believe in God the Father, I believe in God the Son, I believe in God the Holy Spirit I hope in God the Father, I hope in God the Son, I hope in God the Holy Spirit I love God the Father, I love God the Son, I love God the Holy Spirit I believe in, I hope in and I love my holy Mother Mary, who is the Mother of God.

We reach the Blessed Trinity through Jesus.

Father almighty, eternal God: in the name of your Son send your Holy Spirit upon the Church, The Divine Spirit guides the whole of creation, and especially human beings, to the love of the Father through Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God. The Church is constantly reminding us of this by the way all her prayers are directed “through Christ our Lord”.

The liturgy helps us to feel enormous devotion for the Blessed Trinity. And we go to the Blessed Trinity through Jesus, who has become man to redeem us from sin, and to make the Way easier for us, because he has a heart of flesh like ours: Christ is perfectus Deus, perfectus Homo (perfect God and perfect Man). We talk to each of the three Persons with filial piety, because the three of them together, in the oneness of their sanctifying activity, adopt us as children of God. As St Thomas says, adoption, while it is common to the whole Trinity, is appropriated to the Father as its author, to the Son as its model, and to the Holy Spirit as the Person who imparts to us the likeness of the model.

If it is true that God created us, that he has redeemed us, that he loves us so much that he has given up his only-begotten Son for us, that he waits for us - every day! - as eagerly as the father of the prodigal son did, how can we doubt that he wants us to respond to him with all our love? The strange thing would be not to talk to God, to draw away and forget him, and busy ourselves in activities which are closed to the constant promptings of his grace.

Besides, let me remind you that nobody escapes the tendency to imitate others. Even unconsciously we tend to imitate one another. Are we then going to refuse the invitation to imitate Jesus? Everyone strives to identify himself little by little with what he admires, with the model he has chosen for himself. Our way of acting is geared to the ideal we have set for ourselves. Our teacher is Christ, the Son of God and Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. If we imitate Christ, we will attain the marvellous possibility of sharing in that current of love, which is the mystery of God, One in Three.

Putting special care into devotions to the Blessed Trinity.

God is with us. The Blessed Trinity is dwelling in our soul in grace. And so, in spite of our wretchedness, we can and should be continually conversing with God our Lord. Devotion to the Blessed Trinity is something that grows up gradually from the very depths of our soul. God the Father nourishes our piety through the Son, in the Holy Spirit. We wish to increase our devotion to the Triune God by making better use every day of the traditional means which the Church offers us.

If we let ourselves be guided gently by the Holy Spirit, he will lead us, together with the whole Church, along the ways of God. We let ourselves be guided, and the Spirit himself - because such is the divine will - sets us on the way of love for the Blessed Trinity. And we come to understand why it is that the life of the Church so abounds in prayers to the Trinity. It gives us great joy to consider that most of our prayers begin with the sign of the Cross: “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”. Nor are we in the least surprised to learn that the words of praise, Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, date back to the very beginnings of Christianity.

In the Work, our Norms of piety make it easy for us to practise devotion to the Blessed Trinity. If we want to draw closer to the love of the Trinity, we can try to make the sign of the Cross more carefully and attentively. We can really mean the words of glory that we pray during Mass and at the end of each decade of the Rosary. These are simple ways of looking for the constant presence of the Trinity in our lives.

In the Preces, the very first prayer we say is addressed to the Blessed Trinity. This is only natural. The whole Work unites to pray: Gratias tibi, Deus, gratias tibi; vera et una Trinitas, una et summa Deitas, sancta et una Unitas. (Thank you, God, thank you: true and one Trinity, one God most high, holy and one Unity. ) This is characteristic of our spirit - the same spirit that leads us to recite the Athanasian Creed on the third Sunday of the month and to consider the basic truths of our faith in our personal prayer. We need to keep up a constant, loving dialogue with the Blessed Trinity as the most important of all our devotions.

In the course of the year there are various times when our love for the Blessed Trinity is shown in special ways. We sing the Te Deum on the anniversaries of the foundational dates in the Work’s history, the establishing of the Prelature, and the Father’s election, and also on the thirty-first of December every year, as an act of thanksgiving in union with our Mother Mary. And today we repeat our praise for the three divine Persons in the Angelic Trisagium: With our hearts and lips we praise you, we worship you and we bless you, God the unbegotten Father, only-begotten Son, Holy Spirit Paraclete, holy and undivided Unity: all glory is yours for ever.

We need to turn our whole existence into a life of prayer, sacrifice, and service, with a filial devotion to the Blessed Trinity: the Father, the Holy Spirit, and Jesus Christ, perfectus Deus, perfectus Homo (perfect God and perfect man); a tender and solid devotion for the Blessed Virgin, our Mother; and a measureless love for the Holy Church, the Vicar of Christ, and all souls.