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The Importance of the Trinity - to me

As a Catholic - born and raised - and an American influenced by the values of a highly secular society I often feel at odds with myself. On the one hand I feel a part of something that transcends America historically, philosophically and spiritually. As a Catholic I find my sanity in my allegiance to the one and only source of our universe, a God who, though one, is not solitary but a bundle of relationships, sociable - all of which is captured in our concept of God as a Trinity.

As such this God offers me the most fundamental sense of who I am despite the definitions, the transient identities I carry around in my wallet. This Triune God offers me a fundamental and divine society, a home of such durability, that whatever other domiciles I may inhabit, I shall always know where I really belong and whence I come and where I shall always be welcome - and where, since this God is the source of all things great and small, I shall never be alone, but find myself a fellow citizen - indeed a brother to every creature, with whom I may enjoy discoveries of not simply a scientific but a personal nature that will take me the whole of an inexhaustible eternity to exhaust.

In other words, this Triune God whom the Scriptures and Christ define as unshakeable Love, the Love of a Prodigal Father - this Triune God offers me a society so fundamentally solid and gracious that even death may not overshadow its promise nor chill its warmth. And where do I find this family of both God and the whole of his creation but immediately in a visible Church made up of others who share this most radical view of what life and world are all about and who together feed upon the Word and Bread and Wine whereby we nurture this radical sense of home and destiny.

But then I am also a citizen of this secular society that has been described by some as no longer monotheistic but increasingly polytheistic. By that I mean it abhors the thought of my being grounded in anything but myself - my lonely self. A society that would save me from any system, divine or otherwise, based on the conviction that all systems, all over-arching creeds are manipulative, designed to hobble my freedom to do what I damn please; my freedom to be "different".

Indeed, differences are so exalted and proclaimed that it makes one wonder whether such tolerance truly values the wonderful variety of human society and God's universe or is mainly motivated to prevent our finding a universally positive meaning to life anywhere - and especially in a Triune God or Christ or Scripture or Church. Dissent is the watchword of this postmodern environment in which I live out my currently American life - a dismantling of every so-called "truth". (And why not, since people have been so often manipulated by so many pitchmen who would sell us a bill of goods under the label of "truth and values".)

In essence, then, my secular world suggests that I trust nobody. We may still inscribe on our currency "In God We Trust", but that's become passé for many of the movers and shakers of our society. But if you can't trust God or there is no God to trust, then whom can you trust? Friends, strangers, Popes, politicians, the papers, science, Karl Marx, the Law, one's spouse, corporations, unions? Nobody really! - but yourself in all your enfranchised loneliness! Free at last to be lost in a world without coherence. It's while having thoughts like this about the somewhat split nature of my psyche as a secular yet Catholic American that I thank God on Trinity Sunday that I'm Catholic and as such grounded in Someone and Something so much truer than a self founded upon nothing, "independent and free" (for what?) in a mute and unsociable universe.

-- Geoff Wood