Trinity Sunday
Living in the flow of life, the currents blow as they will. Our wills, like sails, catch the currents and follow the patterns and plans drifting along. Sailing, serenity and tranquility embrace us reducing the tensions and frictions of life. Anxiety, stress, and strain become minimal. Life, as we think, ought to be tranquil, comfortable, almost leisurely and lazy as we enjoy the flow of life.
Reality, however, strikes. Life is never easy. The currents change. Gale forces come. Storms arise. Black clouds bring danger destroying everything in its path. Lost in this destruction an eerie calm follows. The mayhem is over, and our lives see the disaster, amazed at the intensity and capacity, the weight and the force of these seemingly gentle and mild currents. They seemed so placid, but within their temperate breeze, these currents become torrents. Warm winds gently breeze until they smash into the cold, arctic gales that churn our emotions. Tempers flare revealing violence and viciousness, even savage and brutal forces. Our lives flow along until they collide with the cold, bitter, harsh facts challenge us.
Knowing the seductive yet destructive power of the flow, a radical reorientation is needed. Emotional complacency no longer trustworthy, we see the damage and destruction of the flow. Our souls look for another current, a mightier force. This Force—the Holy Spirit—comes blowing not raging like a tyrant, but inspiring like a mystic.
Mysticism, that experience in which we taste and see “the uncreated, truth, goodness, and beauty of God” gives us a radical reorientation (Nancy James, Ascent to God, p. 32). This radical reorientation, as St. John Paul tells us, is “The New Pentecost: the infusion of divine love in the soul. In this perennial event, the New Pentecost enlivens the mystical body of Christ, calling all Christians to seek perfection” (Nancy James, Ascent to God, p. 3). Mystics understand this Christian concept: Man is made for perfection!
Today’s currents, called the Enlightenment, have created a different and sadly false mysticism. The secular and temporal replace the religious and the spiritual. Counselors and psychologists become the authority rather than mystics and the monks. Scripture is banned and any other spiritual book, especially those that adore man, gains approval. Jesus is just another of the many sages offering quaint sayings that may or may not improve our lives.
These enlightenment currents which seem so plausible, probable, and practical, produced their fruits. The calm flow of our enlightened age eliminates God. It reduces everything to natural, scientific, psychological, and emotional causes. No longer do we believe in prophets speaking God’s word revealing a different orientation. No longer do we adhere to natural truths that order our nature according to nature’s way. No longer do we praise and worship the transcendent God who transfigures us into his image and likeness. We settle for superficial and artificial. We are not made for dynamic perfection but seek self-satisfaction.
In today’s orientation, persons live by feelings, not by truths, personal not moral goodness, material not spiritual beauty. Emotions become the standard by which we discern and decide truth, goodness, and beauty. Our personal subjective, and relativistic orientation creates the currents we follow.
Affections become the bonds friends found their relationships. Pleasing and pleasurable as these feelings, emotions, and affections are, they reveal a subjectivism which creates an egoism. As St. Augustine saw and explained subjectivism: a turning inward upon oneself making idols of self. Egoism is cannibalism. We devour the goodness and worth of others trying to satisfy our selfishness. In so doing, we destroy ourselves. Self-orientated, the ego drives my life and ensures that my feelings, emotions, and affections produce the life I want, not the life or love that another—especially God—wants for me.
Positioned towards complacency—living in the comfort of my selfishness—anything that taxes or challenges drains us because we are orientated to the tranquil and comfortable. Yet, this mindset, instead of bringing the peace and tranquility we want, causes atrophy as well as anxiety. The weakened self, bravery and boldness, valor and virtue illude us. Our lives become empty shells for we are without interior tenacity. The saddest life evades all testing. We never discover the powers and possibilities of our personal, moral, and spiritual strength and capacity. We seek mediocrity.
If we are never challenged, tested and inspired towards excellence and perfection, then when the storms of the life rage, we lack the physical, mental, moral, intellectual, and spiritual tenacity to withstand the storms. As powerful as our affections, feelings and emotions are, they need commitment, obedience, and, most importantly, sacrifice to orient them. Feelings need interpretation and our minds interpret our feelings making every desire and feeling well-ordered to Christ so we can orientate—choose—perfection (II Cor 10:5).
When our minds interpret our love of desire, the union of affections feelings and emotions, our discernment leads to love excellence. This radical reorientation changes complacency—literally mediocrity—into “The Way of Perfection.” We were made for perfection—not mediocrity. Called to perfection: “You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt 5:48), creates a profound reorientation. Our natural desires are insufficient to lift and fill us with strength and courage to control the flow. Recognizing our natural inabilities to correct or change the currents, we connect to that supernatural force: the Holy Spirit Who is the perfection of our love.
The Holy Spirit creates this radical reorientation. St. John Paul II famous for his call for a new Evangelization ought to be known all the more for the confirmation of St. John XXIII who called for a New Pentecost. In his opening address at Vatican II, St. John exhorts us to accept and embrace this radical reorientation of a “New Pentecost.”
We must recognize here the hand of God, who, as the years roll by, is ever directing men’s efforts, whether they realize it or not, towards the fulfillment of the inscrutable designs of His providence, wisely arranging everything, even adverse human fortune, for the Church’s good (Ascent to God, Nancy James, p. 11).
St. John Paul II, affirming the need for a “New Pentecost” following St. John XXIII and St. Paul VI lead exhorts us to bear marvelous fruits as did the apostles. These fruits create the radical reorientation. The first and most essential is prayerful contemplation: the desire to become a mystic. Next Christians choose complete commitment, along with giving and seeking forgiveness of faults. The radical reorientation also desires prophetic preaching, and discerning then activating the “ever new charisms and gifts, which attest to his (the Spirit’s) ceaseless action in human hearts” (John Paul II, Homily Sunday, 31 May 1998, # 2).
The New Pentecost is Gift Love poured out into our hearts transforming them from merely desiring and wanting that which satisfies; to demanding even commanding that which serves and sacrifices as Christ served and sacrificed Himself.
As the Church teaches, “man can fully discover his true self only in a sincere giving of himself” (Gaudium et Spes, n. 24). Our radical reorientation recognized Christ’s sincere gift of Himself given to us through the Spirit exhorts us to sincerely gift ourselves in return. If God gifts Himself to us, we ought to give ourselves to God. “This is our deepest vocation” (John Paul II, Wednesday, 26 August 1998). Gift-love is the mystery that orientates us radically to Christ and his Spirit.
God is Gift. He gifts Himself to Himself and in so doing He reveals his trinitarian love. The Father gifts his essence to the Son and the Son receives and returns the love. This outpouring of love begets a Spirit, a personification of love between the Father and Son. This personification of the Spirit pours forth Himself into our hearts giving us the mind of Christ. His mind becomes our mind and our mind becomes his mind. As St. John Paul II offers this insight explaining the difference between true gift love and mere desire for love: “Your “I” becomes in a sense mine; it lives in my “I” as my “I” does in itself” (Karol Wojtyla Love and Responsibility p.107). In other words, my I and his I becomes “we”! We are radically united to Christ through the Spirit who infuses in us his life and love.
Through the gift of God’s love, we partake—share—completely and fully in the power of God’s love. With this partaking, we become co-creators of love through the Spirit. As St. Paul tells us, through the “Spirit which is from God that we might understand the gifts bestowed on us by God (I Cor 2:12).
Empowered by Divine Love, we no longer desire love. Matured, we create love. Imbued with this radical reorientation, we know “the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with the fulness of God (Eph 3:19).
Radically reorientated by Divine Love, the storms of life no longer direct our lives, but we, co-creators of love, follow the Ruah—the Breath of God—recreating our world. Recreated, the tragedies and calamities become the very means for us to gift ourselves to others as did Christ. He saw our selfish depravity and our inability to change the raging currents and gave us his ability to gift ourselves as He did, taking away our depravity and giving us his Spirit to restore our integrity. This radical reorientation changes our hearts which in turn change the face of the earth because our lives become a gift to others. Offering ourselves to another’s heart creates a conversion. No longer self-centered, we center our lives on the other. Having received the gift of God, we too find fulfillment enhancing and creating the goodness of the other for we have been recreated through the gift of the Spirit Who makes us new in Christ