Created for Communion
Trinity Sunday
Christians believe that God is not a solitary being but a communion of three divine Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This mystery is not merely something we believe about God; it reveals something important about ourselves. If we are made in the image of God, then we are made for communion.
We recognize this at Mass in the opening greeting taken from 2 Corinthians 13:13: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.” The Trinity is revealed fully with the coming of Christ and his revelation of the Holy Spirit. “We do not confess three Gods, but one God in three persons, the ‘consubstantial Trinity.’” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 253).
Pope Leo XIV refers to this fundamental truth when proclaiming the wonders of human dignity in the face of challenges arising from a new stage of the Industrial Revolution ushered in by the rise of artificial intelligence. In Magnifica Humanitas, the Holy Father speaks about how we are an image of the Triune God. This takes us back to Gen. 1:27, where humanity is declared to be made in the image of God.
“Imago Dei” is a bedrock concept. A human being is not merely a more evolved animal. The other day, I was speaking to a Ph.D. student working on genetic code. She explained that portions of our DNA appear to be remnants of ancient evolutionary processes. Rather than reducing the human person to biology, however, she saw this as evidence of the remarkable complexity of human life.
God is one and three – one God, three Divine Persons. We cannot imitate directly the mystery of the Trinity. The unity and distinction of the Divine Persons are expressed through perfect communion. This gives us a great clue about what it means to be imago Dei.
If communion is the deepest purpose of human life, then we must rethink what success and failure really mean. We have all seen fail videos. They are compilations of people doing something that does not work out, usually because of poor planning or poor execution. Thinking about failure can paralyze us. We become trapped by the fear that things might not work out the way we would have hoped.
The more we grow in faith and dive deeper into the mystery of the Triune God, the more we realize that communion is the goal. We can have a company fail, lose a relationship, or get a low score on an exam. We experience this as a failure and can even make the jump to judge ourselves as failures. However, if we recognize that the goal is communion with the Trinity, these other things suddenly don’t seem so bad.
Created for relationship, every human person is planned and willed by God to enter into communion with him, with others and with creation. Human dignity does not depend on a person’s abilities, wealth or position in life, nor on the right or wrong choices made; instead, it is a gift that precedes and transcends each person, endowed by God as an expression of his unfailing love (Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, 50).
We are created not for isolation but for communion: with God, with one another, and within the life of the Church. We all have moments when we fail in our communion with God. This is called sin, where we rupture the relationship we are supposed to have with him.
We have all had the experience of a sunburn. I remember sometimes being offered medicine or aloe vera and refusing to use it. “I’m fine” is one of our most common self-deceptions, as we remain in the pain and risk of having our skin permanently damaged.
Then we give in, and the relief is almost immediate, leaving us wondering why we resisted treatment in the first place.
Often, when we fall out of communion with God, we also prefer to stay in our sin and brokenness, even when healing through the sacrament of confession is readily available. Already in the book of Exodus, we hear: “The Lord, the Lord, a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger and rich in kindness and fidelity” (Ex. 34:6). It is like a sneak preview of the goodness of the Triune God that will be revealed gradually over the course of the centuries to come.
Build communion with God. Don’t allow yourself to be caught by the lies and deceptions of the Devil. Rather, unite yourself to him by invoking the Blessed Trinity. The next time you make the sign of the cross, pause for a moment. In that simple gesture, you proclaim faith in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The God who created you for communion invites you to share in his divine life.