Having completed the 50 days of the Easter Season with the celebration of Pentecost last Sunday, the Church provides us with three solemnities in short order, sort of as a way of easing us back into Ordinary Time. Today, we celebrate the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity. Next Sunday, we will celebrate the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi). Then on the following Friday after Corpus Christi, we have the Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus.
Several years ago, a friend of mine shared with me a little book that had some reflections on the Litany of the Sacred Heart by Pope St. John Paul II. I do not personally have the book, so it can hard to track down some of those reflections, but I have been able to locate some of them. I came across one brief reflection in which the Holy Father addresses the following image from the Litany of the Sacred Heart:
Heart of Jesus, of infinite majesty, have mercy on us
The reflection comes during an Angelus address that he offered while making a pastoral to Veneto in Italy. In his address, he said the following (translated from Italian to English):
Behold: the infinite majesty of God is hidden in the human heart of the Son of Mary. This Heart is our covenant. This Heart is the closest presence of God to human hearts and to human history. This Heart is God’s marvelous “condescension”: a human heart that beats with divine life—divine life that beats within a human heart. (Angelus, 16 June 1985)
As he continues his reflection, he explains how it is in the Eucharist that we are given access to His heart, and he uses another image from the Litany, that the Eucharist is the “house of God and gate of Heaven”. He then says:
“House”: through Eucharistic Communion, the Heart of Jesus extends His dwelling into every human heart. “Gate”: in each of these human hearts, He opens the perspective of eternal union with the Most Holy Trinity. (ibid.)
The goal of the Christian life is to live in greater intimacy in the life of the Most Holy Trinity, a gift given to us in Baptism and deepened throughout our lives. We will share the fullness of this intimacy in Heaven. Because we can hear how difficult the Trinity can be to understand, we maybe shy away from thinking of life with the Trinity or perhaps think we need to understand the Trinity in order to access this gift. But the Trinity is not first and foremost about understanding an idea. It is about relationship with God, who is three-in-one, and God is love. So life with the Trinity is about receiving and living in that love of God, which we have access to through the Sacred Heart of Jesus. In that regard, I like to share the following quote which I have used in the past about the topic of the Trinity:
When people tell you that they don’t understand the Trinity and Unity, you should reply: I don’t understand it either, but I love it and venerate it. If I understood God’s greatness, if God fit into this poor head of mine, my God would be very small. And yet, He does fit — He wants to fit — in my heart, in the immense depth of my soul, which is immortal. (St. Josemaria Escriva)