As he neared his death, Morrie realized that one thing alone is important in life – our relationships. Everything dies with us except our relationships. Long after we’re gone, we continue to live in the hearts of those we loved.
Our human relationships are the closest experience we can get of God. Isn’t God, after all, pure and perfect relationship? “He who abides in love abides in God, and God in him.” (1Jn 4:16)
Today we celebrate the solemnity of Trinity Sunday. The Trinity is greatest mystery of our faith from which we derive all that we know about God. It is also the mystery that defines our deepest identity and destiny as God’s beloved children. (second reading)
Yet for all its paramount importance and significance, the doctrine of the Trinity has little impact, if any, in the lives of many of us. We think of the Trinity is an incomprehensible mystery about one God in three persons, a dogma to believe and a formula to be recited in prayers and liturgical services.
This is truly sad because the Trinity is more than just a theological enigma or a creedal imperative. The Trinity is our identity, our DNA, for we are created in God’s image and likeness. Hence the life of the Trinity is the template of the life we are called to live.
The truth about the Trinity came to full light only with Jesus in the New Testament. In the Old Testament, God is defined as Being (I am who am). In the New Testament God is defined as Love. He reveals himself as a community of persons made one in perfect love. “Three Persons who are one God because the Father is love, the Son is love, the Spirit is love. God is wholly and only love, the purest, infinite and eternal love. He does not live in splendid solitude but rather is an inexhaustible source of life that is ceaselessly given and communicated.” (Benedict XVI)
God’s life is an unceasing flow of relationships, a trinity and a family to which we are called to participate in baptism. “God is love and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him.” To live God’s life is to live in love, to be in relationship. Thus, God is in every relationship, in the family, in the community, in the parish, in the BEC’s, in friendship.
The Trinity is a mystery we can never fully grasp, but it is a reality we can deeply experience and savor in our relationships. “The strongest proof that we are made in the image of the Trinity is this: love alone makes us happy because we live in a relationship, and we live to love and to be loved.” (Pope Benedict XVI)
The great spiritual writer Ronald Rolheiser tells us that “the most pernicious heresies that block us from properly knowing God are not those of formal dogma, but those of a culture of individualism that invite us to believe that we are self-sufficient, that we can have community and family on our own terms, and that we can have God without dealing with each other.”
A few days ago, the lower house approved the absolute divorce bill on its third and final reading. This is a tragic development since the bill seriously threatens the family, the foundation of society, and defies the law of God. “What God has joined together, let no man put asunder.” (Mk 10:9)
Fr. Achocoso recognizes that the reasons put forward by the proponents of the bill may be real and justified. There are indeed couples who are caught in an irreparably broken union. However, the remedy is not divorce but the improvement the Family Code to include all known grounds for the declaration of nullity of a marriage which was void from the beginning. A divorce law would affect all marriages (including the good ones) since it would change the legal structure of marriage to a breakable contract. For all the good intentions of its proponents, the bill will only create greater damage to the family and to society. Much like the proverbial case of the baby being bathed and thrown away with the dirty water.
We hope and pray that our senators will be more enlightened and God-fearing. The family is holy. It is the sacrament of the Trinity.