Trinitarian mystery

Dt 4:32-34, 39-40; Palm 33 Blessed the people the Lord has chosen to be his own; Romans 8:14-17; Mt 28:16-20

Mystery!


Now here is a word that is often used to describe Who God is from all eternity.

Mystery, enigma, the cloud of unknowing, baffling, perplexing, beyond understanding.


There are many things that are a mystery to me.

How pollen and allergens can cause so much gunk in one's body is a mystery.
Every time allergy season comes around, which for me is almost every day it seems, i enter into a mystery of the human body fighting the minute reality of pollen and allergens.  The way my head and chest get congested and the things that are produced, this is a mystery to me.  How that happens and where does that come from.

As one who does marriage prep with couples, often times i am baffled by the people other people choose to marry.  This is  great mystery.

Scientist say that 90 % of the cosmos is a mystery.

We are a mystery to ourselves.  One of the great lines in scripture sums this up, "I do what i don't want to do and what i want to do i do not do" as St. Paul describes the mystery of grace and nature and sin.

As a seminarian student training for hospital ministry, I was given the opportunity to watch, attend a open heart bypass surgery.  There I was looking down in the patient's chest.  Where is heart once had been was not a square hole.  The surgeon held in his hands the man's heart and was doing his thing all the while the blood was being circulated by this giant machine.  I was in a mystery.

I also attended an autopsy while there.  As the doctor doing was doing the autopsy he would also give us a running commentary on the body as  he systematically took the body apart trying to diagnosis the cause of death.  He paused at some juncture of his routine and mentioned that our veins are so thin, that he was amazed we didn't just die each time we fell.  It was a mystery.

Mystery!

Is is beyond our comprehension.  We cannot fully understand it but we can enter into it slowly.

God is a mystery.  Who God is from all eternity is baffling.  HE is beyond our understanding, yet we can understand somethings.

The fact that we profess God is a Trinity reminds us first foremost that God has spoken.  We only know this because God keeps silence no longer.  THat God has broken the silence and he has stooped down to us and has shown himself to us from the moment of creation, through the prophets and through Christ is son, and in and through the teachings of the Church, God continues to speak to us.

He has revealed something of himself to us. We don't see it all but what we see is truly amazing.

God is one yet three.  He is a communion of love from all eternity. This is our origin and this is our destiny.  We come from love and we shall return to love.

Love remains the path way by which that great exchange occurs.

When we look at the word mystery, the origin of the word stems from the latin and greek which ultimate is reduced to the word "initiate."  Mystery means to be initiated.

Thus, by his revelation, God has initiated us into what is most real.  God is love.

As the uncut version of the the Sound of Music song "16 Going on Seventeen"  begins

 "A bell is not a bell 'til you ring it. A song is not a song 'til you sing it. Love in your heart is not put there to stay. Love is not love...'til you give it away."


Here we encounter the ground of reality itself:  God is love and he gives his love away.


I wonder what would like look like if we focused more on giving and less on getting. Perhaps we could truly enter fully into the mystery and experience the power of God in a completely transforming way. 


Remember the first words of God spoken in the bible as a negative.  When GOd speaks and creates he sees that it is good.  Yet, there is one thing in creation that is not good, that is incomplete.  


"God said, it is not good for man to be alone."


Why.  for alone, he could not give is love away and be open to receive love in alike manner.  It is in exchanging love that we truly activate our true identity as being made in the image and likeness of God. 


It is  a mystery.  Dive in.