Today’s readings: Deuteronomy 4,32-34.39-40; Romans 8,14-17; Matthew 28,16-20.

The mystery of the Trinity we celebrate today is central both to biblical revelation and to our personal spiritual journeys, which themselves unfold in time and in response to so many stimuli in daily life.

We cannot remain fixed in the written tradition of the Word of God. That Word needs to become constantly incarnate. It also needs the constant anointing of the Spirit to be deepened and to bring us gradually to the entire truth not only about God but also about ourselves.

The more we meet people rooted in different cultures and standing for different beliefs, the more we realise how talk about God evolves from one religion to the other and from generation to generation. This diversity commands first and foremost respect because when we talk about God, dogma sounds too presumptuous, if not also dangerous.

The feast of God as trinity does not aim to assert a mathematical certainty about God but a theological one. It affirms God as communion, as in becoming; it states that our grasp of God is always in evolution. From Deuteronomy we have a central discourse by Moses to his people seeking not to define God for who He is, but through what He has done.

In what is considered a classic of Western spirituality, the seventh-century Ladder of Divine Ascent, St John Climacus uses the analogy of Jacob’s ladder to describe how to raise one’s soul and body to God. The last step of this ladder is love. Even the great 20th century theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar has amply written about this Theo-drama and has shown how love alone is the way to revelation. In the struggle of the human mind and heart towards God, the key to his mystery remains only love.

Having to deal on this Trinity Sunday with the God of faith, there is much unlearning that first needs to be done. Faith is more a question of adult talk. Yet where the transmission of faith was concerned, for a long time we put our minds at rest simply by ensuring that children were taught doctrine. In this day and age, this by itself is no longer a guarantee of faith transmission.

The handing on of faith to successive generations today puts to the test the ability of the Church to connect with people on a mature level and to enter into a fruitful dialogue with the scientific mind on the plane of belief. It is here that religion today stands or falls. It is no longer merely a question, as it used to be, of popular religiosity that remains more on the devotional level.

At times, the way we speak of God lacks intellectual honesty and consistency, and we risk even sounding naive and pathetic. This is very dangerous. This reminds me of what Cardinal John Henry Newman writes about what he calls “implicit faith” – faith that demands pure, blind obedience and fears questioning. Newman writes that implicit faith risks becoming superstition in the uneducated, and not at all credible with the educated.

Reading Paul’s letter to the Romans puts God talk on a totally different level: “The Spirit you received,” he writes, “is the spirit of sons, and it makes us cry out ‘Abba, Father’!” It is on the plane of trust, of intimacy that we need to contemplate our journey to God. God’s mystery cannot just be the area of philosophical speculation. The god of philosophers has always been different stuff from the God of faith.

Many who deny even God’s very existence may be proved right if and when the issue is approached exclusively from the point of view of reason. As much as there can be reasons not to believe, there can be reasons to believe. Today’s gospel from Matthew shows clearly that faced with the Jesus reality, some of the disciples fell down before him in adoration, while others hesitated.

The same issues, questions, experiences can always provoke in us different stances and attitudes, depending on the standpoint from which we take the argument. But what is true in all this is that the more we stand by our imagination of who God is, the more we create idols that estrange us from the true God.

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