The Sunday after Pentecost is called Trinity Sunday. Not a big holiday for most of us. But for many Christians it’s one of about seven majory holy days. Before Vatican II, no weddings could be held for five weeks ending with Trinity Sunday.
Thomas Becket (1118-70) was consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury on the Sunday after Pentecost; and the first thing he did was to make it a new festival in honour of the Trinity.
What’s the Trinity got to do with us?
First, what is it? God, the parent, Jesus, the child -- and the Holy Spirit.
God is Relationship
God could be described as a community of perfect love’. Relationships are the very nature of God.
In The Divine Conspiriacy, Dallas Willard contends that we live in what he calls a ‘Trinitarian universe.’ The Trinity of God is not just some theological idea of how we believe the internal life of God is structured but rather the very nature of the universe -- and of all people. If the God who is the Creator and Sustainer of every last thing that exists really is one God in three persons, then something about this filters down all through the cosmos.
We are called to be in relationship
This may mean that we were made to be in relationship, with God, certainly, but also with others and maybe with every other creature that exists.
If a three-way relationship of mutual love and admiration and honour characterizes God, then something of that same sense of relatedness and love constitutes the fabric of our existence. To attempt to live cut off from God, cut off from people, cut off from nature is a profoundly unnatural thing to do. It cuts against the very grain of who we, and what the universe, was made to be.
So maybe the Trinity isn’t irrelevant; maybe it’s a blueprint for how we are to live and be.
