The Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, June 12, 2022 – Proverbs 8:22-31; Romans 5:1-5; John 16:12-15

Pretty much everything you need to know doctrinally about the Blessed Trinity is stated in the two quotes on the front of our bulletin this weekend and anything else we might try to say in a 10- or 15-minute homily is really beside the point. And so, we’ll leave the mystery as the mystery that it is and try to look at it from a different point of view this morning.

That’s why I asked you to pay close attention to the image that’s used by the writer of the Book of Proverbs. It’s one of the Wisdom books of the Old Testament. And this character that’s a metaphor appears several times across the pages of the several books. Today it’s a little child - sounds like a little girl - playing at God’s feet as He creates the world. If we allow ourselves the beauty of that myth of creation just for a moment, then the image is striking. Because all of us have had that experience in our lives of having a little child playing with us as we are working. A child in a garage with daddy, picking up one tool after another, and imitating him as he tightens a bolt or sands a piece of wood. A child in the kitchen, asking to help with the cooking, and imitating. And that’s the image that’s there. It’s a very important image and I want to explore it by telling you something that you may or may not know.

There is a television program call “The Chosen,” it’s a streaming program and you can’t get it unless you have a streaming device. It is a weekly rom-com about Jesus. Jesus only appears now and then in the story. The story circles around all sorts of other people in Jesus’ life. Right now they’re showing episodes 1, 2, 3, and 4 on YouTube as a way of catching your attention. But they’re going to pull them from YouTube pretty soon and then you won’t be able to see them anymore unless you subscribe to the program. The program was created by crowdsourcing. The director raised between 4 and 6 million dollars to produce this program, and it’s as good as anything that ever came out of Hollywood.

In the episode I just watched, the main character is a little girl. She’s about 8 years old. And we first meet her at the beginning of the program. She gets up in the morning and she ties her belt around her waist, then she takes her little cornhusk doll and tucks it into her belt, and off she runs to play. As she’s running through this little woodsy area, she comes upon a clearing where there is a camp, and the camp is deserted, but everything is still there and the fire’s still smoldering. So she starts wandering around the camp, picking at this, picking at that, and she finds a wooden spoon that the camper obviously had used to stir his stew, and she starts feeding her dolly with the wooden spoon, just like she’s watch her mother feed the babies in the family. And, while she’s busy playing, the owner of the campsite shows up. And it’s Jesus. And he starts talking to her. And off she runs to go and play.

The next day she comes back with a friend, a slightly older boy. And Jesus sits down and starts to talk to them. They ask Him what His name is, and what He’s doing. He says He’s a carpenter. They say, “What do you do?” And He says, “Come and see.” And the next day six or seven kids show up. And the next day twelve or thirteen kids show up. And each day there’s a dialogue between them and Jesus. At one point Jesus shows them something He’s making; He’s making a lock and key out of wood. And they say, “Do you have other friends.” He says, “I will, soon.” And that’s the only reference to anything religious in the episode. But one morning all the kids show up, and the campsite has been broken. And Jesus is gone, and everything is gone except one thing. In the middle of the campsite there’s a dollhouse that Jesus has built for the little girl. And on the second story of the dollhouse, there’s a little bed, just big enough for her dolly.

Playing and an arc of growth. In the books of Wisdom, after this little girl appears at the feet of the Creator, she shows up again as a grown woman, the most remarkable grown woman in the entire Old Testament because, against the backdrop of a patriarchal society, she is a free woman, who sets the table and goes out into the community and invites people to come in if they want to feast on her wisdom.

Keep that image in mind, because now we’re going to turn to what I asked you to do in the second reading. St Paul offers us an arc of growth – affliction leads to perseverance, which builds character, and finally creates hope. That sounds like, doesn’t it, a psychological description of maturity. Adversity of various sorts, even if it’s just having to study hard, begins to give us perseverance, stick-to-itiveness. And then, finally, we have character, and that character gives us hope for our life. But, “… and hope does not disappoint because of the love of God, poured into our hearts by the spirit of Christ Jesus, the Lord.” Now it sounds like he’s talking about grace instead. Maybe what he’s doing is he’s talking about the combination of the human arc of growth – childhood to adolescence to adulthood, innocence and inexperience to experimentation to learning to character – both of them together. Because we talk about faith, hope and love as graces, virtues given to us by God. So the two of them must somehow collide. And I want to show you an example of how they collide.

During the dead of winter this year, shortly after New Year’s, on an average morning there are between 6 and 13 people at morning Mass. And one morning we all shuffled in, and there was a young man sitting in the congregation, a perfect stranger. He was deep in prayer. He prayed all the Mass prayers with us, but he didn’t go to communion. So, after Mass, I went up to him and I said, “You’re new here, aren’t you? How ‘come you didn’t receive communion? I noticed you know all the prayers.” And he said, “Because I’m not a Catholic yet.” I said, “What are you doing here?” He said, “I rented an AirBnB for the week to spend a week on retreat before my final preparation to be baptized as a Catholic. And I wished him luck. And he was there every morning for about 4 of 5 mornings, and then he disappeared.

Well I got a letter from him a couple of weeks ago, telling me about his baptism. And I had a couple of questions, so I emailed him. And here’s his answer to my questions. I had asked him what his religious background was, and how he decided to become a Catholic.

As for my religious background before my conversion, there were two stages before I entered the Church. When I was growing up, I was atheist. My parents weren't religious, and where I lived in California, most people weren't religious. So believing in God was something I never even seriously considered in all my years growing up. Then when I went to college, I met a kid who ended up becoming my best friend in college (he is the one who is now my godfather). He was reentering the Church when I met him. He had been baptized when he was born but stopped practicing at a young age. But he was returning to the Church when I met him, and through him, I started to believe in God. However, I was more persuaded by Hinduism than by Christianity and thus was a practicing Hindu during my second half of college and for the last few years since I graduated from college. It was only this past summer that the truths of the faith really dawned upon me, and I decided to enter the Church. I had learned a lot about the faith from that friend and from other friends for the past few years, but for me, it was very much a case of "they have eyes but do not see and ears but do not hear." But all of a sudden over the course of a few months, the reality of Jesus and the Church became clear to me last summer. Thanks be to God and His grace.

What we really know about the Trinity is very little. What we experience about the Trinity is an arc of growth.