For us to experience God, we need the experience of human love and friendship.

Today we celebrate the Feast of the Holy Trinity.  We celebrate the mystery of the inner life of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  The inner life of God is communal, is relational; it is family.  In contemplating the Trinity, we reflect on the family of God. 

Today is a feast of God’s love and mercy.  In proclaiming this Jubilee Year of Mercy, Pope Francis writes that mercy reveals the very nature of the Most Holy Trinity. 

The mystery of the Trinity can only be approached by analogy through our own experience of the power of love.  What we can understand points to what we cannot fully grasp, the inner life of God.  But we glimpse it.  God is a community, three divine persons emptying themselves into one another in an infinite cycle that is the source of all love.

To grasp the inner life of God in the mystery of Trinity, we don’t need to be theologians; rather we need to experience the great gift of friendship and love and mercy in life.  For us, Jesus is the face of the Father’s love and mercy.

Human friendship has the power to free people from the isolation we all experience as individuals.  At its highest point, friendship has the power to overcome the defenses and barriers that keep us separate.  We anticipate the thoughts and the needs of the beloved as our own, and we abandon ourselves in this exchange.  This is the beauty of love and friendship whether it is a young couple passionately in love, or the quiet intimacy of the long-married couple or with old friends whose habits are intertwined with affection and humor and familiarity.

It is only by analogy, but human relationships give us a glimpse into the mystery of the Trinity.  What does this mean?  For us to experience God in our hearts, we need to experience and value the friendship and the love of another in our hearts.  For me, God’s presence is revealed to me in family and in the friendships of my life.  When I love and am loved, I know God in my heart.

In some ways, the feast of the Trinity is the feast of family life.   We come from God in creation and we return home to God as we enter the fullness of God’s eternal life.  What will help us better appreciate where we have come and where we are going to is family life.  In the inner life of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, God is communal, God is family – the divine family.

Our experience of God is discovered in prayer, yes; our experience of God is also discovered in family – your family life.  Trust me I am not presuming your family life is perfect for you to experience  God.  I was born at night, but not last night.  There is struggle in all family life; to be a family is hard work at times.  But God dwells in your family life.  This I know.  In fact, there is no dimension of your family in which God is not present – in sickness and in health, in good times and in bad.

The mystery of the divine family in the Blessed Trinity is perfect in the relationship of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

But the mystery of God’s love and mercy is that God comes to us in our weakness, in our brokenness, in the craziness of our family life.  God’s love for us is unending.  What I like to say is there is nothing we can do to stop God from loving us.

Our response to the Trinitarian love of God for us is one of gratitude.  And so, in this Eucharist, we gather to give thanks to the Lord our God.   When we know the merciful love of Jesus in the depths of our hearts, we will love with an attitude of gratitude for our days. 

What are we to make of the messiness of our family life -- when a couple are struggling to love because past hurts keep them from reaching out in love to each other, when parenting their children seems to getting derailed by the failure of children to listen to their parents and by the failure of parents to listen to their children.  It goes both ways, of course.

The Spirit-filled grace we seek is to see in the struggles of our family life, we realize more fully our need for God’s grace and to be more immersed in the mystery of God’s love for us.  Jesus immerses Himself in our limitations and our struggles.  Through united to God, Jesus empties himself of divine privilege and becomes one of us and dies like a slave.  In so doing, God is pouring out mercy to a broken world.  Our brokenness does not keep us from receiving the love of God; rather, it is because of our brokenness that God send his Son into the world to be our friend as well as our Savior and Lord.

A crazy thought: I wonder if the three persons of the Trinity now use their I-phones or any form of social media to communicate with each other.  How do Father, Son, and Holy Spirit communicate and love each other?  Simply we know it is a person to person relationship in the one God.

My suggestion for the grace we seek in celebrating this deep mystery of the inner life of God is that when we commit ourselves to using our I-phone a little bit less when we are together as a family and we value a little bit more the beauty of person to person family time.  Make sense?  What will it take for your family to take that first step?

At the end of the day, it is in the human love and friendship we have with each other that is the lens in which we will discover the love and mercy of God that is poured on us from day to day, from moment to moment.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.