Monthly Spiritual Message, May 2008
By Fr Carl Schafer OFM
Trinity Sunday
Moses and his people experience God as “a God of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in kindness and faithfulness” (Ex 34:6).
Here is the God of love, creating, saving, and sustaining his people, making himself known to them; recreating, forgiving and healing, and going out to them.
There is a pattern in God’s relations with his people. They experience God as good and loving in all he does for them; God as making himself known to them; and God as creating a loving response within their stony hearts.
This is the pattern of the Trinity that becomes clearer in the experience of Jesus and his people. The God of love shows himself as the Father, God for us, the Son, God with us, and the Holy Spirit, God within us. God makes himself known to us Christians here and now as the Father who loves us, the Son who died to give us lasting life, and the Spirit of strength and love who guides us.
Like Moses and his people, we experience that we are not strangers to God. He doesn’t get fed up with us. He keeps inventing new ways to make contact with us. Even when we are unfaithful to him, he doesn’t cut us off.
Like Jesus and his people, we experience that God wants to communicate with us, to convince us that he loves us. He sends his Son to show us God in human terms. He even gives him up to death out of love for us.
It all shows who God is, that he is all love, and how much he cares for us. “Yes, God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son …For God sent his Son into the world … so that through him the world might be saved” (Jn 3:16-17).
God loves the whole world, not just one nation, not only our people, not only people who love him. God wants to make himself known to the world, so much so that God becomes a man, and the man becomes a dead corpse out of his love for the world.
Out of love, God sends his Son so that whoever believes in him should have life from him (cf. Jn 3:16). Out of love, the Father and Son send their Spirit with the assurance: “He will guide you to all truth” (John 16:13).
We are caught up in God’s sending his Son and their Spirit. God sends us to the world that he loves. God gives us to the world that does not necessarily love us or him. We are sent to show the world who God is. We show people who God is when we rejoice in our experience of God as our Creator, Saviour, and Sustainer: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
The way that Francis of Assisi followed and that he proposed to everyone was simply to go to the heavenly Father, by means of the beloved Son, in the light of the Holy Spirit.
Franciscan spirituality is therefore first and foremost trinitarian. Francis
had a deep awareness of the transcendence of God – infinite, almighty, all holy – eternal source of life and of love, one God in three divine Persons, inter-related as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. For Francis, this was not merely theological language. This was his lived experience.
In fact, the experience of God in relationships lived out with the three divine Persons is an essential element of Francis’s spiritual life. It defines spirituality for all of us who are called by God and gifted as Franciscans. God invites us to follow Francis into the heart of the Gospel, where we will meet the three divine Persons who speak to us in Jesus Christ.
At the same time as Francis adored the transcendent God, he had a deep awareness of the immanence of God, that is, the presence of the Blessed Trinity in God’s own creation. God is the creator of everything that exists, the provider for every creature, and the necessary sustainer of all life.
God the Father is the original father and mother of every creature. God
the Son is the original brother and sister of every creature. God the Holy Spirit is the most intimate friend of every creature and the original spouse of every person. Our parents, our brothers and sisters, our friends, especially spouses in the case of the laity, are the instruments whom God has created and chosen to effect his own fatherhood, sonship and loving intimacy in relation to each of us.
If we try to make of our Christian and Catholic life more than a system of beliefs and teachings, religious practices, laws and morals, and strive for a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, the man of the Gospels, the crucified man and the risen Lord, then we are behaving in a Franciscan way. St Francis did just that. He confronted his own person with the person of Jesus.
May we Franciscans, too, in our own way, try to grow beyond Christianity as a system, towards Jesus Christ as our brother, our Saviour and our God, leading us to the Blessed Trinity.
Carl Schafer OFM
National Spiritual Assistant SFO – Oceania
Almighty, eternal, just and merciful God,…
may we be able to follow in the footsteps of your beloved Son,
our Lord Jesus Christ,
and, by your grace alone, may we make our way to you,
Most High, who live and rule
in perfect Trinity and simple Unity,
and are glorified God all-powerful, for ever and ever.
Amen.
St Francis, Letter to the Entire Order
