Thoughts from the Second Floor Front
The Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity
June 15, 2025
As Catholics, just about every prayer we offer begins with it and concludes with it. Today we celebrate that essential mystery of our Faith – The Most Holy Trinity. Saints and theologians with great minds have wrestled with the effort to articulate its meaning and in so doing have come to a deeper understanding of this deepest article of faith. The Most Holy Trinity as an intellectual entity has not put us off coming to understand our relationship with Father, Son and Holy, Spirit as a disciple and entering into that Divine community.
In a sermon on the Feast of the Holy Trinity St. John Henry Newman addressed a phenomenon that was evident to him in the nineteenth century. Addressing the complex theological issues, Newman decried attempts to take theological issues and “compare them together, to weigh and measure them, to analyze, simplify, refashion them; to reduce them to system, to arrange them into primary and secondary, to harmonize them into intelligible dependence upon each other.” He protests the efforts to engage in a sort of reductionism that falsely seems to attempt to make these challenging aspects of our faith more approachable and helpful to us in a simple manner. We should not avoid thinking about or meditating and reflecting on the Trinity because it is a mystery and apparently beyond our intellectual comprehension. We are called to embrace the Trinity and enter into the Mystery, not avoid it.
The reading from Psalm VIII addresses the mystery of our existence that calls on us to reflect this Sunday on the greatest mystery of our faith – The Most Holy Trinity.
When I behold your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you set in place — What is man that you should be mindful of him, or the son of man that you should care for him?
This is expressed clearly in the beautiful hymn, often sung at funerals “How Great thou Art”
Oh Lord, my God
When I, in awesome wonder
Consider all the worlds Thy hands have made
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder
Thy power throughout the universe displayed.
We live in an age that is marked by terrific advancements in technology. However with that progress there is a trap in which, if we are not careful, we can easily fall. The trap is to fail and recognize what glory is around us. Years ago I was taking the Cape May Lewes Ferry from Lewes to Cape May. It is a beautiful ninety-minute ride from Lewes to Cape May. I was living in the Washington DC area, in school at Catholic University, and was – as we say in Philadelphia going down the shore for weekend. While out in the shipping lanes on the Delaware Bay you can see dolphins leaping out of the water, gulls swooping down and up looking for a handout, on any beautiful sun drenched day. I walked the ferry and saw many people sitting inside. Wondering what the attraction was I noticed a number of huge televisions sets playing a prerecorded version of the TV Game show Jeopardy.
Surrounded by beauty of the created world, sadly people chose to ignore it and watch reruns. Todays feast calls us into the mystery. When we make the sign of the cross and invoke that most deeply spiritual mystery, which is our faith, may we have the ability to more deeply appreciate the ineffable beauty of the world as well as the amazing merciful and gracious God. Call on Him in prayer. Call on Him in need. Call on Him in praise for the gift which is ours. Call on Him - Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Faithfully,
Msgr. Diamond