LET ME TELL YOU WHO I AM

Mother Teresa said: “The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little love. The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty — it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. There’s a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God.”

We want to be loved and so does God. Not that God is like us and is in some poverty stricken state. God wants us to respond because God knows that in making that response we flower as the creatures we are.

To enable us to respond God wanted to tell us who God really is. We know how frustrating it can be when people pigeon-hole us into this or that character. They put a label on us as if that is all we are. You are a selfish wealthy westerner. You are a narrow-minded Catholic. You are a male chauvinist pig. You are a feral feminist. There is more to us but the label stops people looking or being open to what we want to reveal about ourselves. We know God cannot be frustrated like we can, but God tired of being described in inadequate ways. Hence the coming of Jesus. In him there was no message about God coming through go-betweens, like prophets or dreams or displays of nature like wind, fire and earthquakes. In Jesus, people met God in the flesh.

Trinity Sunday is the fruit of the revelation about God that comes in Jesus. By reason alone human beings can come to know that God exists but not who God really is. Only God can self-reveal as it is only you and me who tell others who we really are. Jesus did not give us the creed that we recite each Sunday but his words led us to see that in the oneness of God there was something like an inner-family dynamic. In the creed we use the words Jesus used: Father, Son and Spirit.

The early believers quickly accepted the divinity of Jesus. St Thomas saying to Jesus: My Lord and my God. With this as their starting point they pondered on what he did. When he prayed he spoke to Abba, Father in very familiar ways. He spoke of always doing the Father’s will. When he knew his life here was going to end he promised his friends he would send the Spirit who would lead them to the truth and would remind them of everything he had done and said. Over many years, they gradually formulated the words that we recite as the creed.

The Father, Son and Spirit share love constantly one with the other and yearn that we, made in the image and likeness of God, we enter into their shared life and find the remedy to our disease. Loneliness, despair and homelessness will be cured because we shall know and experience love in its fullness.

Fr Adrian Farrelly