Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity

   
       

Holy, Holy, Holy ....

Glory to you, O Trinity, 

one God in three equal Persons, 

as in the beginning, so now and for ever.

Father all-powerful, 

Christ Lord and Savior,

Spirit of Love, 

You reveal yourself in the depths of our being,

drawing us to share in your life and your love.

One God, three Persons,

be near to the people formed in your image, close to the world your love brings to life.

                  The Father is Love, the Son is Grace, the Holy Spirit is 

their bond of fellowship, O Blessed Trinity.

                   The Father utters the Truth, the Son is the Truth he utters, and the Holy Spirit is Truth, O Blessed Trinity

These are some of the beautiful texts of the Liturgy of the Hours for today's solemn feast of the Most Holy Trinity. We don't need to understand in order to savor, and rejoice in the Lord. Always.

The Freedom of the Children of God

With the solemn feast of Pentecost we come to the end of the Easter season which we have been celebrating for 50 days commemorating the Resurrection of Christ. On Monday after Pentecost we have again Old Testament texts at the Office of Readings starting with the beginning of the Book of Job.
The story is familiar, a fictional conversation between God and Satan which turns Job's life upside down and inside out. In one day the rich man looses all his possessions, his herds, his sons and daughters, his servants ... As Job receives one piece of news after another he is broken down in distress and has only one thing to say:

"Naked I came forth from my mother's womb,

and naked shall I go back again.

The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away;

blessed be the name of the Lord!" Job 1:21

It strikes me the freedom of such statement, the total, complete TRUST of accepting the worst of the worst with peace.

Job was a very wealthy man owning all the riches that a successful man could gather, and enjoyed feasting with his large family. But the riches and the celebrations didn't take in his heart the place of the Absolute. What an incredible freedom!

This deep sense of Job's freedom has remained with me for several days with almost a feeling of envy. At this point of the story Job is not yet in rags, he is the master of many servants, the respected elder, the faithful worshiper of the Almighty. But above all he is used to looking at the Real in the eyes and can surrender from the bottom of his being. This is the freedom of having all without any attachment. This, I think, is a true "blessed" poor in spirit - and a contemplative.

This reminds me of the freedom of Mary, the Mother of Jesus, at the Annunciation, when in an instant, she risked everything in response to the unexpected, to the "intrusion" of Mystery in her life. With her humble Yes she risked being stoned to death. 

Thomas Merton says somewhere that a contemplative is the person with whom God can do whatever God desires. This is the person totally available to God and to God's Plan. 

We live in times where as a society we are trying hard to grow into human maturity and freedom for everyone, we are trying hard to decide what is best and often the louder voices telling us the direction of our blessings and fulfillment are themselves totally out of touch with their own deepest soul values.

It is good and necessary to work for our betterment and development of our skills, that's the purpose of our gifts and abilities! The paradox of it is that we need to reach that place of maturity and independence where we are liberated from abuse, poverty, ignorance etc., and yet this is only half of the journey. Even if/when we get there a whole new and intense journey has still to take place. This is the journey of transformation, the divinization of the Christian spiritual journey. It is an ascension into minority. It is about growing smaller and true, real. It is about discovering our utter dependence on God once we have reached all the goals of human development. When we have all that can be achieved, when we have lived and been productive and successful we can discover that it is not enough and that more of the same will never be enough.

This is the time to respond to life with heart and soul, with the faith of an infant who is carried in her mother's arms, small and free to welcome life as it really is coming from the Womb of our Destiny, even if that destiny brings -as it does for all of us- aging, sickness, and diminishment.
We have a Christian name for this, we call it the Paschal Mystery, a mystery of suffering, death, and burial which culminates in an unforeseen fullness of Life. In God. 

The Work of the Holy Spirit

As we pray for the coming of the Spirit during this time of expectation, the Liturgy of the Hours sets for us the tone. The Office of Readings in particular offers us some pearls of our faith in the words of the Fathers of the Church.


We read from the treatise On the Holy Spirit by Saint Basil the Great: "The Spirit is the source of holiness, a spiritual light, ... The power of the Spirit fills the whole universe ... Simple in himself [or herself], the Spirit is manifold in his mighty works. The whole of his being is present to each individual; the whole of his being is present everywhere ... Like the sunshine, which permeates all the atmosphere, spreading over land and sea, and yet is enjoyed by each person as though it were for him alone, so the Spirit pours forth his grace in full measure, sufficient for all, and yet is present as though exclusively to everyone who can receive him. To all creatures that share in him he gives a delight limited only by their own nature, not by his ability to give. 
The Spirit raises our hearts to heaven, guides the steps of the weak, and brings to perfection those who are making progress."


The Spirit of God is God's very self in action, always "at work" for us, with us, in us. Always available, always present, always inviting, always seducing, and always unique in expression to each person, granting Gifts for the good of all. We call them charisms:
"From the Spirit comes foreknowledge of the future, understanding of the mysteries of faith, insight into the hidden meaning of Scripture, and other special gifts."


These individual expressions of the Spirit in everyone of us are meant to help us in our journey. But what is the direction, the goal of that movement? Where are we going that we need the Spirit? What is it all about? What is the ultimate seduction of the Spirit? 


St. Basil concludes: "Through the Spirit we acquire a likeness to God; indeed, we attain what is beyond our most sublime aspirations -we become God."


We don't hear this kind of expression in our Sunday homilies and yet this "theosis" or "deification", our transformation through the journey of life, was clearly expressed by the  contemplative theologians, the Fathers and Mothers of the early Church. They wrote from their own experience, which means that this is not just the talk on "the other side" of eternity, this is about here and now, our journey on planet Earth, today.


St. Paul had already experienced and written about this: "Life, to me, is Christ" (Phil 1,21).  "It is no longer I who lives but Christ lives in me" (Ga 2,20)


M. Maria Celeste Crostarosa, a Neapolitan mystic of the XVIII century and the instrument of God for the foundation of the religious Institute of the Most Holy Redeemer with St. Alphonsus Liguori -Redemptorist missionaries and Redemptoristine nuns- writes extensively and repeatedly about the transformation of the human person into Christ, this divinization. 
In her Degrees of Prayer  (12th Degree) she describes the transformation of the person in the spiritual journey as a new creation, and makes a parallel with the Creation passage in Genesis. When she comes to the Seventh Day she writes:


"Adam being created, he relaxed and slept. That's when the Lord rested also -on the seventh day. Created-man found rest in the Divinity and the Divinity found it in Adam. Having created man for His own rest and dwelling-place, He delighted in the original model, His Son, and rested. Our soul has God for its delight and rest when she is created all over again in her original innocence.
After all these works of creation are made all over again the soul is given the likeness of the Son of God. She is given an original innocence and divine simplicity -just as man was made in the beginning. Then God rests in the soul and she sleeps and rests in God's delight."


After two more pages describing this condition of the person, M. Maria Celeste continues:
"Here it is fulfilled at last the longing man had when, in the earthly Paradise, the hellish serpent persuaded him to eat the fruit from the tree forbidden by the Lord. [The serpent said that] By eating it he would become like God. 
Just what he longed for has happened. The Lord wanted this longing of man to be fulfilled but, for man's happiness, in a different way from what the enemy had suggested.
That tree of Paradise, forbidden to Adam, was a figure of the Word of God made man, and whoever dared eating from it would die. That is, for those who eat it and die it was indicating the Jews because they would eat His flesh through envy and kill Him. 
But this fruit of life, through His death, should enliven us with eternal life. It should also become for all the chosen souls the fruit and food of life in the Blessed Sacrament of the altar, where -in a real, true, and admirable way- when we ate from it, we would be transformed into the living God. 


This is the work "par excellence" of the Holy Spirit, our transformation into Christ already on this side of eternity. This is the contemplative journey. This is our destiny. 
Our daily life becomes the womb of transformation when we invite and follow the lead of the Spirit as modeled for us by so many brothers and sisters who, through the centuries, have become living memories of Christ on earth.

Ascension of the Lord

After the ordeal of the Passion and death of Jesus, the disciples experienced the incredible shock of a fullness of life they could touch, see, talk to and with. This was called the Resurrection, that is, the same Jesus alive and living yet not the same but rather evasive and transcendent.

The Ascension is a further step into the Mystery. Now Jesus is no longer seen or touched but the learning of the Easter days remains: Jesus, the Christ, is alive and present, near, intimate, he is The Lord.

This new step is somehow familiar territory to the apophatic contemplative who remains like Mary (the Mother of Jesus) and with her praying in the upper room, holding in faith the emptiness of the senses and the ignorance -maybe the overwhelming void- of the mind.

Mary of Nazareth, Mary Mother of Jesus, holds the womb in which new life is being gestated, in which the transition will be possible to a newly born interpretation, understanding, and evidence of God's action and presence.

The Church will be born in Pentecost from the contemplative womb of faith.

The Contemplative Church enters again today in the Cenacle of prayer for a new birth of the Church in this time of history. Let us be the contemplative Church gathered in prayer, together with Mary, the Mother of Jesus.