Today, we celebrate the Most Blessed Trinity—three persons in one God. It is a day we reflect a little on our image of God. Who is God for you? This question is important since our conception of God determines how we relate to him. Often, people’s conception of God does not tally with how God reveals Himself. While some see him as a mean tyrant waiting to pounce on our mistakes, others see him as a liberal slack sanctioning whatever transgression one decides to engage in.
God in revealing himself in three readings of today, shows himself as “a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger and rich in kindness and fidelity”. A God who so loved the world that he gave his only Son. A God who is love and peace itself. A God always on the lookout for us, his children.
Dearest ones, God’s love as St. Paul tells us in the second reading, demands a response from us. Love is what defines the Trinitarian relationship and that is what we are celebrating today. On how to respond, Paul tells us that we should all mend our ways; meaning, living our lives to conform closely with that of the Trinity. In the Gospel, we are warned that whoever does not believe has already been condemned.
One practical way to mend our lives is living and searching for peace; agreeing with one another as Paul demands. Each of us is to be a messenger of peace in our today’s broken society through our personal actions that brings peace and joy to our immediate neighbors and friends. We are, like the Trinity, to put common good above our personal preferences. Today, each of us needs to make St. Francis prayer his or her personal life’s mantra:
“Lord, make me an instrument of your peace; where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; and where there is sadness, joy. O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console; to be understood, as to understand; to be loved, as to love; for it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.” Amen.