Dear Believers in the Christ,

We have celebrated the Lenten season, renewing our own baptisms at Easter. Pentecost is a gift in which we know peace, forgiveness and the mission of the Church. Today, we celebrate the Trinity, a summary of what we have celebrated in the past couple of months.

The Trinity is a reminder that God thrives in community. For us to follow God means that we also must thrive in community. When we arrive at our church door on Sunday, the first thing we do is to put our fingers into water and mark our bodies with the sign of salvation, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

This marking is not a throwaway gesture. This gesture symbolizes that we belong to God first of all. We carry within our lives the beauty and the hopefulness of our loving God who created us, redeemed us, and promises to be with us for all eternity. We belong to God in all of our humanness, our frailty and our incredible love and integrity.

We also mark our bodies with the Sign of Cross because we belong to one another. This image of God, our community, is incredibly beautiful. In other words, we live as God lives. We live on the earth being united to one another as the three persons of God— Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This is the gift of our baptism. This is our renewed life of baptism fully alive. This is the reason we have celebrated once again the glory of the Easter season and Pentecost.

This is also why we believe in the beauty of all life. We respect the integrity of human life because we all hold within us the dignity of God. We belong to one another through the miracle of God’s life within us. This is rich and whole; this belonging motivates us to become people who imitate God in the world. We learn to put into practice who God is, so we heal relationships, we lift up the poor, we forgive our family members and the stranger and we stoop low to be humbled by our mistakes.

The gospel tells us that the truth God gives us is revealed to us in moments at a time. We cannot bear it all at once. We live and grow as all creation. We have seasons of good and letting go; we bear fruit and know times of darkness. God reveals such love and goodness as we mature. Our task as Christians is to learn and to become wise in all we do. Sometimes we grow weary and lose sight of such a mystery. This is where violence and hatred overtakes our concerns, anger and rage at not getting our own way becomes real. If we can live and pray daily in our life of God, we grow in hope. Where there is love there is hope. We must overcome our human instincts to be violent and revengeful and instead learn to be people who reflect the community, the love and the hope of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Blessings,

Fr. Ron