“O eternal Trinity, my sweet love!” — St. Catherine of Siena

This weekend is the solemn feast of the Most Holy Trinity. Every year, these days leading up to it fill me with a visceral awe. It’s my favorite feast of the whole year, though it is of course not the most important one!

The dogma of the Trinity is the Mystery of mysteries, the epicenter of the whole of Christianity and of the whole cosmos. It is the Feast that celebrates the unveiling of the secret character and nature of God, the hidden inner structure of his eternal Being. This Mystery takes us from believing that one God exists to knowing who God is — and judging from the reactions to Jesus’ astonishing and radical rethinking of the idea of Israel’s one God, the “who God is” question sent a shockwave though his Jewish contemporaries:

I and the Father are one.
The Jews picked up stones again
to stone him.

We should allow ourselves on this feast to experience the Jesus-shock of the Jews of his time. This feast is meant to offer you a mind-bending, heart-rending invitation to intimacy with the God who is love in an unimaginable way.

You received a Spirit of adoption,
through whom we cry, “Abba, Father!”
The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit
that we are children of God

Trinity Sunday is celebrated on the Sunday after Pentecost because on Pentecost the Holy Spirit finally, fully and definitively comes into the world, being made manifest now as the Spirit of the crucified and risen Messiah, the eternal Son of the Father. At Pentecost, both the Son and the Holy Spirit set in motion their ultimate mission: to reveal to us the hidden Father, reconciling us to him and inviting each of us to come home. There, in the Father’s house, we will sing, dance and feast with the Three who have pursued us down the ages.

These days we are in now, between Pentecost and Trinity Sunday, are days given to us to prepare to worthily contemplate, celebrate, taste, see and enter into this ineffable, unspeakable mystery of God, who is One and Three. I invite you to beg God, these days ahead, to reveal himself to you and invite you in. There, you will join St. Catherine of Siena’s lush prayer:

You, O eternal Trinity,
are a deep Sea,
into which the deeper I enter
the more I find,
and the more I find
the more I seek.

Seek, and take a deeper dive…

Only begotten Son and Word of God,
Thou Who art immortal
And didst deign for our salvation
to become incarnate
of the Holy Theotokos and ever-virgin Mary,
without change becoming man,
and who was crucified O Christ God,
trampling down death by death;
Thou who art one of the Holy Trinity,
glorified together with the Father and the Holy Spirit,
save us.

[I love how the cantor expeditiously ends it]