Posted by The WORD in other words (2017) – Father Randy Flores SVD – Divine Word Seminary, Tagaytay City
Solemnity of the Most Blessed Trinity – A
In a remote barrio in the island of Iling, a two-hour boat ride from San Jose in Occidental Mindoro, there stands a small chapel dedicated to the Holy Trinity. Many devotees flock to this place during fiesta of the Santisima Trinidad. Old people would tell there a legend of the wooden image of the Holy Trinity.
It was one morning, so they say, that a certain fisherman found a wood in his ballad (fish corral). Thinking that it was just simple driftwood, he threw it away. This happened every morning until the man decided to bring home the wood to turn it into a sangkalan (chopping board). He noticed however, that the wood had blood and, after cleaning it, an image, a beautiful one, appeared. It was the image of the Holy Trinity. He then brought it to the chapel and soon after a devotion by the local people started. Even the small chapel was named in honor the Santisima Trinidad.
Today, the wooden image is no longer there; people said it got shipped out of the island. A replica, however, was preserved and that is what one sees in the chapel today. The devotion has not waned as the legend and the replica have sustained the people’s faith in the love and mercy of the One and Holy Triune God. Recently, a popular healing priest even built a much bigger church in honor of the Trinity.
The doctrine of the Trinity is central to the Christian Faith. We call it a mystery — a revealed truth that surpasses the powers of natural reason. “They mystery of the Most Holy Trinity’s the central mystery of the Christian faith and life,” says the Catechism, and “it is the mystery of God himself.” Saint Augustine even called this mystery of God a “beauty so ancient yet so new.”
The Gospel today best describes the beauty of the Holy Triune God: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son…” (John 3,16) God is one but also a “Triune Being in love.” It is a self-diffusing love and thus the Father has bestowed his Son to the World. That love, the “substantial love” between the Father and the Son is none other than the Holy Spirit (Hans Urs von Balthasar).
In the first reading from Exodus, we find that the Rabbis call as the Thirteen Attributes of God. It begins with the profession that God is “merciful”; this attribute would then be enhanced further by the saying that God abound in “steadfast love” (HESED in Hebrew and twice mentioned). It is for this reason, as the theologian Cardinal Walter Kasper says, that mercy is a “mirror of the Trinity.”
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