Today’s readings: Proverbs 8,22-31; Romans 5,1-5; John 16,12-15.

On this Sunday when the Church celebrates God as Trinity, we may ask the pertinent question why the Church speaks of a triune God and what difference does it make believing simply in God or in a God who is three persons. Actually the issue does not ultimately concern God Himself but rather the way we comprehend Him.

In the fourth century, St Augustine distinguished between wisdom and knowledge, and medieval theologians wisely distinguished between understanding and explanation. Today we live in a culture that struggles to explain everything and that even refutes as unacceptable all that cannot be explained. But there are things that remain hidden and unexplainable in life and yet which can be understood.

Explanation demands knowledge, understanding is in the realm of wisdom. Wisdom in the first reading from Proverbs today is perceived as standing by the side of God in the process of creation. It was there before things were made. Just as it is in our heart and mind before we can grasp the meaning of things and of our existence itself.

Wisdom is one of the first and primordial gifts of the Spirit which the risen Jesus gives to those who follow him and who on their way struggle with the truth of things. This Spirit of wisdom helps us in our inroads towards what has a grasp on us in daily life much before we ourselves come to have a grasp on it.

Paul in the second reading from Romans speaks of grace, which in his understanding is interchangeable with wisdom. It is grace that sparks in us our going beyond what we experience at face value. It is grace that narrows the distance between us and God, that makes us God-like, to use a concept so dear to the early Eastern Fathers of the Church.

The triune God has meaning for the way we experience God gradually and ever partially. From day one in our catechetical formation as Christians, we are faced with the question about who created us, where we come from and what is the purpose of life. To those ultimate questions we are provided with ready-made answers which philosophically, rather than theologically or from a Christian perspective, seek to resolve the puzzle.

It is only later in life, as we humanly relate to the person of Jesus of Nazareth, that we explore and discover how his words and gestures in the gospels resound in the depths of our being, mind and heart. Jesus is the human face of God, he is God who enters our frame of mind and who touches the depths in our heart. His Spirit, transmitted to us through his dying, offers us grace and empowers us to exit our darkness and understand what otherwise remains inscrutable.

Normally we claim that God is a mystery. That should not mean that he is mysterious. God is a mystery which is approachable and even comprehensible. But there is a key that opens and resolves the puzzle, a key that He Himself provides in the fact that our nature as humans is a graced nature. Openness to God’s mystery is a possibility for each and every one of us.

To various extents, we are free how to deal with that possibility. We can opt for explanation, and that leaves us with a God who is a labyrinth, a riddle that always leaves margins of darkness and doubt. We can let go, not in the sense of abdicating reason but to be sort of led by His Spirit, who leads the way towards the whole truth.

This whole truth remains an unsurmountable mountain, and the more we seek to get hold of it lump sum the more we cannot accomplish the task. But the more we approach it gracefully, in fragments, the more it possesses us, making us enter the mystery rather than undo it.

“One step enough for me,” would be John Henry Newman’s approach, when amidst the darkness and encircling gloom he let the light kindly leading.