The God whose name is Love

We celebrate the greatest, the most profound and incomprehensible truth of the Blessed Trinity. Herewith we confess three Persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit in one God. The divine Persons are relative to one another, which means they form a unity of life and love with no beginning and no end. Face to face with this one God in three divine Persons, we do not begin analyzing, dichotomizing, digging the truth so as to fit it into our finite reasoning. We simply cannot. In humble faith, we fall on our knees and adore, believing the truth which has been revealed to us by the Word of God. God is eternal blessedness, undying life, unfading light. God is LOVE: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God freely wills to communicate the glory of His blessed life to us. Such is the plan of His loving kindness, conceived by the Father before the foundation of the world, in His beloved Son.

M. Scott Peck says that “unconditional love doesn’t come naturally to us humans” (M. Scott Peck, A World Waiting To Be Born, p. 64). But when we speak of God as Love, that cannot but be unconditional. Unconditional love, however, is always the ideal held up to us when we love. Somehow, we attempt to care unconditionally for each other. No ifs, ands, or buts. This is how it is with the three Persons in the Blessed Trinity. It is a relationship in which each Person knows each other perfectly and loves each other perfectly. Unconditional love is of the essence of the most blessed Trinity.

We Filipinos are a very Trinitarian oriented people. We do mean to relate to God when we make the sign of the cross, “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” And it seems already innate to our people who have the faith, some of them unschooled in the elements which constitute our religion. An example is the jeepney driver who professes his belief in the three Persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit by making the sign of the Cross everytime he drives past a church. Our young people make the sign before they go onstage. Athletes do it before they go to the basketball court. Our elders make the sign on newly cooked rice before they spoon off for serving. Parents cross their children’s forehead before they go to sleep. Farmers sow grain in the form of a cross. What do these all mean? Don’t this imply a dependence on the unconditional caring of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?

The unconditional love of God is at the very heart of our relationship with God. How Godlike, then, do we become when we strive individually to love with an unconditional love. And how close a family could be if it strives to relate like the Father, the Son and Holy Spirit. Such a family is held together by the understanding they have of one another and the unquestioning love they have for each other. What kind of world would we have if everybody would make an effort to be godlike, i.e., loving one another the way God would have us love — forgiving one another’s offenses, helping those who need our help, doing justice, having compassion for those who suffer?

God so loved the world: The only explanation that we shall ever have of the gift of eternal life made possible for us in the redemption achieved in Christ is the incredible love of God for the world (cf. I Jn 4:9). And we, in whatever position we are, are asked to declare with our lives that incredible love of God. We all, each one of us — father and mother of families, the young, the rich and poor, the sick and the suffering — have to remind each other that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit and we can always call upon Him because His name is LOVE.

Solemnity of the Most Blessed Trinity, John 16:12-15