By special arrangement, The National Catholic Reporter Publishing Company is able to make available Bishop Thomas J. Gumbleton's weekly Sunday homilies given at Saint Leo Church, Detroit, MI.  Each homily is transcribed from a tape recording of the actual delivery and made available to you as an NCR Web site exclusive.  You may register for a weekly e-mail reminder that will be sent to you when each new homily is posted. From time to time, Bishop Gumbleton is traveling and unable to provide us with the homily for the week. NOTE: The homilies are available here five days after they are given, always on Friday.

This week's readings ** Exodus 34:4-6, 8-9 So he cut out two stone tablets like the former ones, and Moses rose up early in the morning and went up to Mount Sinai, as the Lord had commanded him, and he took two stone tablets in his hand. The Lord descended in the cloud and stood there with him as he called upon the name of the Lord. Then the Lord passed by in front of him and proclaimed, "The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in loving kindness and truth… Moses made haste to bow low toward the earth and worship. He said, "If now I have found favor in Your sight, O Lord, I pray, let the Lord go along in our midst, even though the people are so obstinate, and pardon our iniquity and our sin, and take us as Your own possession." 2 Corinthians 13:11-13 Finally, brethren, rejoice, be made complete, be comforted, be like-minded, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you. Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the saints greet you. John 3:16-18 "For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him. He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God." * A longtime national and international activist in the peace movement, Bishop Gumbleton is a founding member of Pax Christi USA and an outspoken critic of the sanctions against Iraq. He has appeared on numerous radio and television programs, and has published numerous articles and reports. * Scripture texts in this work are in modified form from the American Standard Version of the Bible and are available as part of the public domain. For your convenience, the Scripture texts, as they appear in the Lectionary for Mass for Use in the Dioceses of the United States, second typical edition, Copyright © 1998, 1997, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Washington, D.C., may be found at the website of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCC). http://www.usccb.org/nab/ ** The Web link to Pax Christi is provided as a service to our readers.

There is something different about the feast day we celebrate today, the Feast of the Holy Trinity, and the feasts we have been celebrating most recently, such as Easter, the resurrection of Jesus, or the Ascension of Jesus, which we celebrated a couple weeks ago, where Jesus makes his final departure from his disciples and they don't experience his bodily presence any longer, or last week when we celebrated the feast of Pentecost. That was a very powerful experience of those first disciples of the church, when the spirit of Jesus was poured forth upon them, made their hearts burn with love and forced them almost to go out into the streets and proclaim the good news.

Those feasts have concrete experiences behind them. They celebrate something concrete and real that happened in history. There's nothing so concrete, so real, in a sense, about today's feast, the Feast of the Trinity.

We have made some attempts to make it concrete. We have, for example, in the window up here St. Patrick showing how he converted the Irish and explained the Trinity with the three-leaf clover. But that really doesn't come close to expressing the truth of the mystery that we celebrate today.

We may not be aware of this but that formula that we all learned when we were very young about one God in three persons - Father, Son and Holy Spirit - that formula was not even developed in the church until almost 300 years after Jesus. The early Christians didn't have a formula like we do that says so clearly that there is one God in three persons. That doesn't mean that God wasn't being revealed as a father who loves us, or we could even say as a mother who loves us. And then as we hear in the Gospel: "God so loved the world that God sent the son, Jesus, into the world." And, of course, the powerful working of the Holy Spirit is very plain in the scriptures too. But we never, or the early church never really formulated all of this into some kind of a concrete belief as precise as, "I believe in God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit, one God in three persons."

I think that over those 300 years, the church was struggling to try to get a handle on this mystery, until finally it came up with that formulation. Philosophers and theologians spend a lot of time trying to explain how you could have three persons in one God. I remember back when I was studying theology it was spelled out in great detail, the whole mystery. There were four relationships, three persons, two processions, and one God.

What does that mean? It doesn't really hit us very much, does it? But that's how we tried philosophically to explain three persons in one God.

There was a danger in this I think. It was almost, in a sense, pride in humans trying to get a handle on God, trying to bring God down to some sort of formula that we could understand. We were almost reducing God to ourselves, and of course that's a huge mistake. God is beyond everything and anything that we could understand, which is why we need not worry so much about the formula and the three persons in one God and whether there are four relations or three relations and two processions or four processions. What difference does it make in knowing God? We know that understanding God is beyond our capacity and any time we try to understand God by making God fit into our concepts is reducing God to the our level; that's not God.

So it is important to understand that even though we have this clear formulation of what the Trinity and the mystery of the Trinity is, that doesn't really capture God.

When you think about it, when the formulation was agreed upon, during the Council of Nicea in 325, during the time of the Roman Empire, this might not have been the best time for the church to come to this understanding of three persons -- father, son and Holy Spirit -- because under Roman law, "father" was not a term, for the most part, that made people respond with love. Under Roman law, a father had total control over the life of his wife and the life of his children. It was a period of what we call patriarchy. Because of that, it seems to me, we within the church lost the sense of God as mother and with this idea of God as father, we also took up the cultural accumulation that had built up during the Roman Empire where a father was seen as a dictator within the family; a father could punish, even kill, his spouse or child and would not be subject to any law.

It was that kind of an extreme understanding of fatherhood that to some extent got passed over to into our reflection on God and we neglected all those parts in the scripture where God is one person, the source of all life, source of all creation, and is also imaged as a mother.

Remember how Jesus at one time spoke about himself, compared himself to a mother hen gathering together all the little chickens and protecting them, guiding them. A mother.

Or in the book of the prophet Isaiah how God is revealed as one who loves us so infinitely, without limit, without condition that it was like the love of a mother for a child nursing at her breast. Isaiah even went beyond that saying that even if a mother would reject her child, God would never reject us.

So God's love is a mother's love without limit, absolutely without limit. But we hardly ever draw from that image of God, and I think it's because we put together this formula for the Trinity at a time when the culture around the church, within which it was situated, put such emphasis on father, on father as ruler and dictator. So may be its time that we move away from that.

Another thing to reflect on is how absurd it is for us to try to capture God in any formula whether it be father, son and Holy Ghost, Creator, Spirit and so on. Source of all life. Source of Power. You can't capture God. I remember reading a story -- it's probably not really true but it serves to emphasize the point about one of the early theologians; I think it was probably Augustine. He was trying to grasp this mystery of the Trinity. He wanted to understand it and then be able to explain it so that everybody could understand it. He was walking up and down, reflecting and thinking, trying to come up with the right words. He comes upon a little child carrying a cup. The child is going down to the ocean, bringing a cup of water and pouring it into a small hole the child has dug. Augustine asks, "What are you doing?" The child says, "Well, I'm taking the ocean. I'm going to pour it into this hole." He says, "That's impossible!" And the child says, "Well, so is it impossible for you, ever, to truly understand God, one God in three persons."

And so we don't try to understand it. But that doesn't mean that we don't come to this feast day with expectations of trying to come into a deeper relationship with God. We can't fully understand three persons in one God, but we know immediately that God is a God who loves, reaches out to others from the son and the Holy Spirit and that there's a mutuality. There's a community of life, a communion of life within God. That's God's image for us -- that we have to reach out in love. We're made in the image of God. If we're going to be like God then we have to relate to others with mutuality, with respect, with love, with caring. And we have to be quick to forgive, just as we heard in that first lesson today: "Yahweh is a God full of mercy, slow to anger, abounding in truth and loving kindness. God shows loving kindness to the thousandth generation and forgives wickedness, rebellion and sin."

God is a God who is totally merciful, and that's probably harder to believe for many of us than that God is one God in three persons.

God loves us no matter how we have failed. God loves us at every instance and with every inch of his love. God is quick to forgive, always ready, reaching out to forgive us. How many of us really believe that? But that is what the scriptures reveal about God; this is a God who loves, who is love. That is the most important thing we need to take from our celebration of this mystery of the Trinity: God is the communion of life where there's sharing, mutuality, total giving.

That is made clear when we listen carefully to the Gospel: "God so loved all of us, so loved this universe, so loved all of creation that God sent his son, Jesus, to be one of us, to become fully human. God gave Jesus, the son, but then the son so loved us that he gave himself."

That brings to mind immediately the words of St. Paul, "Jesus, though he was divine, did not think his ability something to be clung to but emptied himself." Emptied himself! Became human, fully human. Gave himself over to death like every one of us, but even to the ignominious death on the cross. Because Jesus loved us, he was willing to accept hatred and brutality and violence perpetrated against him and respond with love even to his enemies. That's the kind of love God has for us. That's the kind of God we worship when we worship a God who is love and who lives in this community of persons that is bound together by mutuality and love. Total giving.

How do we respond to this?

First of all, we respond with gratitude and try to waken faith within ourselves. But then we have to try to be like God. We're made in God's image. Sometimes we try to destroy that image within ourselves. I read this week, and perhaps you did too, about the torture that went on in a prison in Afghanistan, even before it happened in Iraq under some of the same people, under the same military leadership. Two men were hung from the ceiling by their wrists and their legs were shackled, and they were beaten till they died. What an utter desecration of the image of God within those who could be that brutal.

You see, when we don't love we destroy God's image within us. When we allow ourselves to hate, use violence, kill, we are destroying the image of God. So we have to always maintain an awareness that it is God who is love who has made us in that image of God. Therefore, we have to be people who love, who give of ourselves. Just as Jesus poured himself out in love for us, we have to keep on reaching out in love for one another.

At the end of his letter to the church at Corinth, Paul urged them, "Mend your ways. Strive to be perfect. Encourage one another. Be of one mind. Live in Peace."

"Then," Paul said, "the grace of Jesus, the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit will be with you forever." That is the gift we receive when we try to understand who God truly is and that we are made in the image of this God. And then when we live according to that image, then the grace of Jesus, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit will be ours forever.

In the name of the father and of the son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.