26 May 2013 – Trinity Sunday
Shared Homily Starter
1st reading: Proverbs 8.22-31, Responsorial: Psalm 8, 2nd reading: Romans 5.1-5,
Gospel: John 16.12-15
Thought
themes: Wholeness – Whole – Holy – Love
Energy
Several years ago, Sarah and I were on a Global
Awareness Through Experience or GATE program in Mexico. One of the places we visited was a
café-general store and guest house in Cholula
run by an Aztec family. While we were
chatting with owner’s daughter, our GATE program director asked her, if God was
male or female in Aztec theology. Her
answer gave me one of those “Yes!” moments.
She said, “God is neither male nor female. God is energy”. The gods and goddesses in the Aztec pantheon
are aspects of the Divine Energy that attends to a specific need of the people
at a specific point in cyclical time, for example, harvest time or during drought, etc.
I relate this story to demonstrate how we have been taught to think in
dichotomies: male/female, good/bad,
rich/poor, us/them. What would it take─
and imagine the impact─ if we thought instead of wholeness, of circles or
spirals. I remember, in Catholic Parochial school, being taught to
picture the Trinity as a triangle. What
if we thought of the Trinity as an amorphous circle, with all of creation at
its center? We know that God is Love and
at different times the center is in need of a different form of Love Energy
from the Bountiful Amorphous Circumference.
Think of each of us and each individual being as a cell of the body of
Creation. Each cell is nourished by God.
This brings me to Tony’s question of last week, which was actually a question
on today’s gospel. Now that I’ve had
some time with both the question and the readings, I’ll share my thoughts.
Genesis, chapter 1, says, “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness [was] upon the
face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the
waters.” The Hebrew actually says
“vibrated over the face of the waters.”
Then in the opening of the Gospel of John, we hear “In the beginning was
the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2He was
in the beginning with God.”
The verses say to me that the Trinity always existed in the creative energy of
Love that is the Breath of God. Pursuing
the energy analogy, at one time in our history, God the Parent, gathered a
particular group of us and groomed them to be the recipient people of the
Word-Made-Flesh. Then at the next stage
in our history, the Word-Made-Flesh in Jesus, came to continue the formation of
this community. Consider, for a moment,
that Jesus came to teach us how to live, how to treat each other with love,
justice and compassion in spite of what is going on in the society around us. If we look at it this way, we can further
envision that we are to imitate Jesus, by living as he taught, and indeed, how
he lived.
Now to use another analogy, as children we go to school and as young people
(and in my case, not so young), we go to university. Eventually, we have to leave school and university
behind and use what we’ve learned to make something of our lives. Our professors are no longer there for us,
they have helped us acquire the tools for analysis and inquiry but basically,
we’re on our own.
What Jesus is telling us in today’s Gospel is that he’s not leaving us on our
own. He has given us the tools─ and─ He
sending his Holy Spirit to guide us.
Although not in the flesh, Our God is, and always has been, with
us.
What are your thoughts on the Trinity?
I relate this story to demonstrate how we have been taught to think in dichotomies: male/female, good/bad, rich/poor, us/them. What would it take─ and imagine the impact─ if we thought instead of wholeness, of circles or spirals. I remember, in Catholic Parochial school, being taught to picture the Trinity as a triangle. What if we thought of the Trinity as an amorphous circle, with all of creation at its center? We know that God is Love and at different times the center is in need of a different form of Love Energy from the Bountiful Amorphous Circumference. Think of each of us and each individual being as a cell of the body of Creation. Each cell is nourished by God.
This brings me to Tony’s question of last week, which was actually a question on today’s gospel. Now that I’ve had some time with both the question and the readings, I’ll share my thoughts.
Genesis, chapter 1, says, “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness [was] upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” The Hebrew actually says “vibrated over the face of the waters.” Then in the opening of the Gospel of John, we hear “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2He was in the beginning with God.”
The verses say to me that the Trinity always existed in the creative energy of Love that is the Breath of God. Pursuing the energy analogy, at one time in our history, God the Parent, gathered a particular group of us and groomed them to be the recipient people of the Word-Made-Flesh. Then at the next stage in our history, the Word-Made-Flesh in Jesus, came to continue the formation of this community. Consider, for a moment, that Jesus came to teach us how to live, how to treat each other with love, justice and compassion in spite of what is going on in the society around us. If we look at it this way, we can further envision that we are to imitate Jesus, by living as he taught, and indeed, how he lived.
Now to use another analogy, as children we go to school and as young people (and in my case, not so young), we go to university. Eventually, we have to leave school and university behind and use what we’ve learned to make something of our lives. Our professors are no longer there for us, they have helped us acquire the tools for analysis and inquiry but basically, we’re on our own.
What Jesus is telling us in today’s Gospel is that he’s not leaving us on our own. He has given us the tools─ and─ He sending his Holy Spirit to guide us. Although not in the flesh, Our God is, and always has been, with us.
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