Each Sunday when we recite the Creed we profess our belief in God. We can arrive at a belief in the existence of God through the application of reason to the realities perceived by our senses. From our understanding of the world we can deduce that it must owe its existence to a god as first cause. Our reason too may suggest to us that there can logically be only one god and that he/it is possessed of the qualities one would expect of an infinite, unique being: eternity, power and other qualities with which one might expect a philosophical first principle to be endowed. When we Christians profess belief in God it is not the first cause of Aristotle or the god posited by rationalist philosophers in their explanation of the universe. No, we profess belief in the God who has revealed himself to us as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Moreover, our faith and belief in God, consonant with reason though it may be, is a matter of the heart even more than it is of the mind. And that is because God has revealed himself to us through love. And today, on this great feast of the Trinity, the Church invites us to celebrate the diversity of ways our God loves us and the variety of modes of his presence in our earthly lives. God reveals himself to us in the beauty of creation, in the overpowering splendour of the universe and in the richness of life itself. It is our conviction, however, that in addition to the god we posit as the object of natural religion we also come to know and love God who revealed himself to us through the sacred and secular history of his chosen people, who came and dwelt among us in the person of Jesus of Nazareth and who envelops us in the love that unites the Father and the Son in an eternal embrace. The Creed makes very concrete our understanding of the God we worship and believe in as Trinity. What is clear from all that we have learned through Revelation about God is that we are absorbed into the wonder of his divine being because he loves us. And the only way to make sense of the Church dogma which is the focus of today’s feast is to reflect on the variety of ways God loves us: through his paternal care, through his brotherly solidarity and through his life-giving energy – and this is only a start. It took centuries for the great Christian theologians to elucidate in intellectual, rational terms that belief in God as Trinity which we find already in the earliest letters of St. Paul. It was at the ecumenical Council of Nicea (AD 325) that the Church first reached a consensus on its understanding of the one God and the three divine persons. Our Creed dates from that Council. Yet right from when Jesus proclaimed the kingdom of God, when people understood what occurred on Calvary and what was signified by the cross, and when the Spirit propelled the disciples to become missionaries to the whole world, there was a conviction among the Christians that in Father, Son and Spirit they encountered the one only God who made himself present through love.
Father Patrick Daly