The Anchoress
Andrei Rublev’s Gorgeous Icon of theTrinity, early 15th century
On this Trinity Sunday, some healthy, helpful reads:
Begin with Pat Gohn’s appreciation of The Sublime Logic of the Trinity
The revelation of God as Trinity reveals Who God is and what God does. The Trinity is the core of all Christian beliefs, as the well-known tri-fold structure of the Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene Creed illustrates.
In describing the “Who” of the Trinity, the Preface echoes the Creed by naming the Three-in-One Godhead according to the relationships contained therein—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Focusing on the relationships between the Persons of the Trinity, in the Creed and the Preface, unlocks its logic.
Msgr. Charles Pope: My God is so High, You Can’t Get Over Him:
One of the great masterpieces of the Latin Liturgy is the preface for Trinity Sunday. The Preface, compactly, yet clearly sets for the Christian teaching on the Trinity. The following translation of the Latin is my own:
It is truly fitting and just, right and helpful unto salvation that we should always and everywhere give thanks to you O Holy Lord, Father almighty and eternal God: who, with your only begotten Son and the Holy Spirit are one God, one Lord: not in the oneness of a single person, but in a Trinity of one substance. For that which we believe from your revelation concerning your glory, we acknowledge of your Son and the Holy Spirit without difference or distinction. Thus, in the confession of the true and eternal Godhead there is adored a distinctness of persons, a oneness in essence, and an equality in majesty, whom the angels and archangels, the Cherubim also and the Seraphim, do not cease to daily cry out with one voice saying: Holy Holy, Holy….
Wowza! A careful and clear masterpiece, but one which baffles the mind as its words and phrases come forth. So deep is this mystery that we had to invent a paradoxical word to summarize it: Triune (or Trinity). “Triune” literally means, “Three-one” (tri+unus) and “Trinity is a conflation of “Tri-unity” meaning the “three-oneness” of God.
Shameless Popery: Understanding Sex Through the Mystery of the Trinity:
To understand sex, I think you need to understand the Trinity. In the Trinity, God the Father loves God the Son, the Son is Beloved, and the manifestation of that Love is the Holy Spirit. Fr. Barron does a good job explaining that here. It’s precisely because of that Love that God made the Universe and everything and everyone in it. So the Trinity is both a Unity and Creative. So the very same love that draws the Father and Son into an unbreakable Divine unity is the love that causes them to create the universe.
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