The Most Holy Trinity
Concilium Allocutio June 2011
By Fr. Bede McGregor O.P.
Spiritual Director to the Legion of Mary
The Most Holy Trinity
Today is the feast of the Most Holy Trinity and so we are invited to reflect and pray on this central mystery of our faith. The Trinity is not only a doctrine that we feed our minds on; it is the inner life of God, which we are called to share in and to make our home in. We are baptised into the life of the Trinity. The relationships which we have to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are the deepest relationships that we can have in our lives. As Christians we actually participate in the very life of the Trinity. The life of grace is simply the life of the indwelling of the Trinity in the deepest core of our being, our very souls and pervading every aspect of our lives. This mystery of our faith is not only the centre and core of our contemplative life but the animating source and goal of our apostolic life. Our Lord’s last words on this earth, his great command to evangelise the whole world are about being baptised into the life of the Trinity. All pastoral and missionary apostolate is ultimately about leading people into the life and intimacy of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This is what conversion work is all about.
The chapter in the Handbook on ‘The Legionary and the Holy Trinity’ is perhaps the most profound and most practical part of the Handbook. Frank Duff, our Founder, writes there: ‘The saints are insistent on the necessity for thus distinguishing between the Three Divine Persons and for rendering to each one of them an appropriate attention. The Athanasian Creed is mandatory and strangely menacing in regard to this requirement, which proceeds from the fact that the final purpose of Creation and the Incarnation is the glory of the Trinity.’ As was his wont, Frank Duff sought insight into the relationship we have to each Person of the Trinity by turning to Mary. He writes: ‘But how can so incomprehensible a mystery be even dimly probed? Assuredly by divine enlightenment alone, but this grace can confidently be claimed from her to whom, for the first time in the world, the doctrine of the Trinity was definitely intimated. That occasion was the epochal moment of the Annunciation. Through its high angel the Holy Trinity thus declared Itself to Mary: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God.” (Lk 1:35) In this revelation all the Three Divine Persons are clearly specified: first, the Holy Spirit, to whom the operation of the Incarnation is attributed; second, the Most High, the Father of him who is to be born; third, that Child who “will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High.” (Lk 1:32) The contemplation of Mary’s different relations to the Divine Persons helps towards our distinguishing as between the Three.’
Put very simply Our Lord shares with us His life with the Trinity. He teaches us to pray ‘Abba Father’ because that is the reality. We are the children of the Father in Christ. In him we seek always and everywhere to do the will of the Father. As Blessed Dom Marmion use to say, our lives like Christ must be totally Ad Patrem, turned towards the Father. We live within the ambit of the Father’s loving providence that governs the minutest detail of our lives. We can experience in faith the Father’s love and relationship to Jesus and the relationship of Jesus to the Father. These are stunning truths and realities of our faith. How desperately impoverished our lives would be without them.
Then, of course, we begin and end everything with the sign of the Cross. It is through the Cross that Christ gained entrance for us into the life of the Trinity. Our life in the Trinity is the fruit of the Passion and death of the Lord. As Saint Francis was fond of praying to Our Lord: ‘My Lord and my God, my God and my all.’ Of course our faith and life are radically Christocentric.
Finally, the Father gives to us His Son and then the Father together with the Son gives us the gift of the Holy Spirit. We become temples of the Holy Spirit. We are enveloped in the life of the Trinity. This Trinitarian life is the fruit of our redemption and the beginning of eternal life even here on earth. The Handbook spells out much more succinctly and beautifully how Mary lives out the mystery of the Trinity in its unity and plurality of persons. We will never cease to benefit from re-reading again and again this chapter of the Handbook.
The best commentary on this chapter that I have come across is the life and words of the Venerable Edel Quinn. The vice postulator for her cause wrote a wonderful article entitled: Edel Quinn: A Life in the Trinity.’ Let me conclude by giving you some very brief quotations from Edel and the conclusion of the article. She writes: ‘Let us ask the grace to live in realisation of our life in Christ through Mary, adoring the Trinity’; ‘In Christ Jesus we have all. Realise this. Often offer Him to the Trinity, present in our soul, giving all honour, reparation and glory throughout the day’; ‘Realise I am a temple of God, the dwelling place of the Trinity’; ‘In Christ we adore the Trinity. Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus. Try and adore the Trinity in our souls, even in the midst of trouble or external duties’; ‘With Christ and helped by Mary, let us adore the Trinity. Cut out useless worrying thoughts ... to adore with and in union with Jesus ... the Trinity in the soul ... per Mariam.’
Fr. Anselm Moynihan concludes: ‘For Edel Quinn, then, the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity was not just an abstraction, to be accepted indeed on faith but with little bearing on the practical working out of our lives. For her it was supremely practical, vital and energising. Her manner of applying it to her life, her prayer, her work, her relations with others offer an example we can imitate - to the glory of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.’ He concludes with a quotation from Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity whom Edel read avidly: ‘The Blessed Trinity ... there is our dwelling place, our home, the Father’s house which we must never leave.’ I would add that if we wish to seriously try to live the Christian life in depth which is the primary aim of every legionary, we will have to learn to practice in real earnest, living with the tremendous reality of the indwelling of the Trinity in our souls. Amen.
