Trinity Sunday – 15 June 2025

Celebrating a wedding. It’s always a happy occasion, and one full of expectation! Indeed, every wedding brings before us something for which we all long: the simplicity of falling in love, the promise of exchanging a commitment to each other, the hope of beginning a life together. the midst of all the other troubles and uncertainties we experience in the celebration something with all the promise of being good, true and beautiful. And it fascinates us. Somehow it brings us home to ourselves.

For many, their wedding is not the first time that they have exchanged a commitment to another person.  But at wedding there is every hope that this time the commitment will work. And every person who is at the wedding shares this hope, even though they know that such a commitment is not easy to sustain, and that time may prove it not to be possible to sustain.  Yet, this reality does not take away our hope for a truly committed, life long, and faithful partnership. We have this hope for the couple, because we have this hope for ourselves. Even in the face of what difficulties we may experience in our relationships, we still have this hope that enduring love is possible, and that a life shared together is an undeniable good for ourselves, and in our world.  We want this for ourselves; we want it for others.  And deeply imprinted in our psyches is the recognition that that is the way it should be, that this is the way by which we become fully alive and fully human.

It is this imprint that, in fact, we celebrate in our Christian understanding of God as Trinity. Jesus has revealed to us an understanding of God that is complex.  God is not simply a single form of being, but a complex form of being that is radically constituted by relationship. In God’s very life, eternally, there is a self-emptying, a self-giving, a receiving. The entire cosmos is premised on nature and the quality of relationship.  

And it is in the image of this God which is infinite relationship that we have been made so that just as God is defined, so are we: we exist in relationship or not at all; we are our relationships, we are made for relationship, and can become who we are only through our relationships. There is no other way. It is the truth of God, and because of this, it is our truth also. We are made for communion.

There is nothing more destructive for us than isolation.  This is why the worst punishment we can mete out to someone, other than killing them, is to banish them to solitary confinement. On the other hand, though, there is nothing more life-giving than giving and receiving love, to know that we are being loved, and that we are able to love. God’s very being, from whom all life generates, underscores this for us. This is why our proclamation of God as Trinity is not a strange, ethereal doctrine. 

To declare God’s life as Trinitarian is to be given the very map of our life which highlights precisely where we take wrong turns and where out true orientation lays.

Our lives become a sacrament of the Trinity when we think of ways to cultivate relationship with all those with whom we come into contact in the regular comings and goings of our daily life: our visits to the supermarket, school, sporting events, and even in our own homes. 

In fact, it’s in our everyday life that we are called to be a light to others and bear witness to the mystery of the Trinity. A simple smile or a kind word to someone when we don’t feel like it or a spiritual encouragement to someone we know is struggling can go a long way to build up our relationships with those God has placed in our life.

Are there other ways we can go out of our way to befriend others? Perhaps we can volunteer our time. There are many places—hospitals or nursing homes or in our own parishes—where people might be suffering, and we can lend our time for no other purpose than to share a cheerful face or a kind word. 

Or perhaps we can go a step further by organizing something and inviting people to come along. Or we might simply gather with a few friends over coffee for some spiritual conversation and encouragement. 

As we develop and maintain lasting friendships, as we enter a great celebration such as a wedding, we are never closer to understanding the very mystery of the Trinity.

And sometimes along the celebration of a wedding can help us recover our direction.