Reflection for the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity (Cycle B)
In today’s most solemn celebration of the Triune God, we are recalled to the deep mystery of the dynamic oneness of divinity whose enigmatic will has chosen for the sake of creation, to be an indivisible union of beneficent particularities.
It is indeed an immense grace that we are enlightened to believe not in a one-dimensional deity, but in a benevolent Spirit who can act as well as wait, who can create as well as re-create, who can admonish as well as forgive, who can love as well as liberate.
It is with this recollection that we are reminded in spite of our diversity – our natural differences and chosen individualities – to remain united in common causes for the common good. Like God, we must act and wait together, we must create and re-create together, we must learn from and forgive one another, we must love and liberate those others who have been left behind.
God’s perfect oneness will forever challenge our imperfect oneness. The eternal perichoresis will forever be the baseline of our fragile koinonia.
Koinonia is a beautiful word which means “communion,” “participation” or “sharing” in Greek, most appropriate to remember in an age filled with alienation, loneliness and a perpetual competition for survival, in which only “the fittest must live, and the weak must die.” It is a word that is in itself an advocacy for the right of every creature to grow and develop, and that no one must unwillingly be destroyed for the sake of another.
Just as God is an omniscient continuum, his creation is also intended to be a continuum of spirits, where creatures are meant to be together and to be a part of each other’s present existence.
If we all wish to believe we have been created by God for a reason – living with a multitude of strange others in an infinitesimal point in the cosmic order of space and time, when and where we can barely be proud enough to “stand out from the rest” – then we must not see that ‘reason’ only in relation to “helping ourselves live in spite of others”, but in relation to “helping others live in spite of ourselves.”
Otherwise, if we were meant to destroy each other – as we are all now doing to each other – then what sense will there be in his divine wisdom to create us in the first place?
Just as God is a synergized union of differentiation, so are we differentiated beings struggling for the interdependence of an ideal union, to which we are called to be a part of each other’s future fulfillment.
We have all been created by him for individual purposes, with individual gifts as well as individual shortcomings. But the Spirit prompts us to make our own different contributions to the evolving tapestry of the human condition, so that others may benefit from what we can give, as we gain from what we have received.
Koinonia is not only a state of “togetherness,” but a movement of “building up.” Koinonia is an expression not of a passive and indifferent co-habitation, but an active striving for justice, peace and the integrity of humanity and creation, a robust sharing in the efforts and struggles of living in a difficult and hostile world, which we may not be able to do on our own.
The actualization of koinonia will assure us that we can all live out our lives in its glorious fullness. No one is left behind, no one is deprived of the basic necessities of life and everyone can be educated into a solid ethos of morality that can soothe our troubled souls, and uplift those who are falling into despair. Koinonia allows us to give our best back to the Spirit, the source of its goodness.
But we are not living out koinonia properly, which explains why in spite of all technological interconnectivities, we feel alone and defiant against our own faith. To live out koinonia is to first have a deep intimacy with the Father and to have a profound sense of kinship with all creation. Love begets compassion, which begets service and action; self-centeredness then begets a more wicked selfishness.
In times of aimless ruminations, are we not asking, “Why is it quite difficult for me to have compassion on a street-child who has turned into a thief?” or “Why is it difficult for me to care for the environment in my life, as I would do for my family or work?”
“What would it benefit me if I become a brother or sister for the rest of creation? Have they been good to me?” or “Why should I give any importance to destitution in my midst if I am busy advancing in my well-paying career?”
“Why should I visit sick people I hardly know, or prison inmates who perhaps deserve what they got, or victims of injustice who were maltreated by some of my influential friends?” or “Why should I be concerned for the loss of an animal or plant species, which I may never get to see anyway in my lifetime?” or “Am I concerned for global warming and climate change, only because a critical increase in temperatures may melt the icebergs, raise the ocean water levels, and destroy ‘my beautiful mansion’ of a home?”
Are we all only caring for our private comfort bubbles? We have been conditioned to breathe the air of an insulated isolation, separated from the truths that can reveal both our propensity to hate and our capacity to love. We have instead of building up others, built up tall borders and thick curtains to protect these private zones for ourselves, but so covered that we can hardly see the miserable plight of the world, and believing with the naïve conviction that it does not exist.
It is a manufactured environment from where we extract from the outside all we need for consumption, and from where we throw to the outside all we deem as unneeded waste. We are dedicating then so much of our precious hours in sustaining the orderliness of our bubbles, while remaining clueless of the chaos we may be causing outside of it. And for some, the chaos may already be nefariously deliberate.
To think that we should love only what we cherish within our imagined domains, is the mentality that kills koinonia. Authentic communion demands that we fully engage the chaos we started, sustaining the orderliness of our shared universe in its entirety. May we pray therefore to become like God who is both and at once a harmonizing harmony.
Brother Jess Matias is a professed brother of the Secular Franciscan Order. He serves as minister of the St. Pio of Pietrelcina Fraternity at St. Francis of Assisi Parish in Mandaluyong City, coordinator of the Padre Pio Prayer Groups of the Capuchins in the Philippines and prison counselor and catechist for the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology.
The views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of LiCAS.news.
