Fr. Michael Williams

Trying to speak or write about the Most Holy Trinity is an almost impossible mission.

A boy once told St Augustine of Hippo, that trying to write about the Holy Trinity was like putting the ocean into a bucket!

Another saint of the Church, St Bonaventure, said that all of God’s creation, in various ways, contains traces of the Holy Trinity imprinted upon it. And so God’s creation speaks to us of God in so many varied ways.

So the billions and billions of stars in the Universe reveal to us something of the magnitude of God, although all these stars are like a drop in the Ocean, compared to the reality of God.

St Catherine of Siena took up the ocean imagery in the thirteenth century when she prayed, ‘O eternal Trinity, You are a deep sea in which the more I seek the more I find, and the more I find, the more I seek to know You’.

The part of the Holy Trinity’s creation, which most reflects God is the human race, with it’s capacity to love God and to love one another. Indeed when the Holy Trinity willed to create the humanity It said, ‘Let us make man in our own image, according to our likeness…So God created man in His image, in the image of God He created them, male and female He created them’. We know Satan led the human race astray (and continues to do so today), and so distorted God’s image in men and women.

But the Holy Trinity sought to restore humanity to it’s former dignity and so ‘God sent His Son into the world…so that through Him the world might be saved’. God continues to send His Son to us to save us and renew us, especially through the Sacraments, through His Word, through prayer. God comes to us in the stillness and the peace. Satan is the one who makes all the noise!

The Holy Trinity has given us the means to live in His Presence, in stillness and in peace, even amidst the turmoil of this world. ‘The God of love and peace’ comes to us when we open our hearts to Him, when we truly believe in Him, as He is ‘a God of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in kindness and faithfulness’.

And St Teresa of Avila put it well when she said, ‘Let nothing disturb you, let nothing frighten you, all things pass away: God never changes. patience obtains all things. He who has God finds he lacks nothing; God alone suffices’.

Like the saints we can never understand the great mystery of God, but we can rest secure in His immeasurable love and peace.