Yesterday was the day on the Christian liturgical calendar known as “Trinity Sunday.” The Sunday following Pentecost (the celebration of the coming of the Holy Spirit)…early June and the beginning of summer.
I have had several memorable Trinity Sundays. One was in 1978, in Washington DC, when I was visiting Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Georgetown. I was interviewing for a position as a Jesuit volunteer, a job as the coordinator of Zacchaeus Medical Clinic, an inner city free clinic. The local Jesuit volunteers took me to church at Holy Trinity and during the liturgy, members of the Community for Creative Non-Violence remained standing as a sign of their commitment to social justice. I had never seen anyone stand throughout a worship service, much less as a protest or a witness. Little did I know that seeds were planted that Trinity Sunday that would indeed lead me to become a Jesuit Volunteer, work at the free clinic, and later enter medical school.
Many years later, on Trinity Sunday in 2001, I was received into the Episcopal church, along with my husband. My spiritual path had meandered from being baptized as an infant by my Methodist minister grandfather, through a Presbyterian childhood and adolescence, into a young adult conversion to Roman Catholicism, and now to the Episcopal church that seemed to be the synthesis of all three earlier traditions..the Episcopal church that made room for my Quaker leanings, my Zen curiosity, my love of movies and books and enjoying friends. This was the commitment that we made in the spirit of wanting our daughter to grown up in a community of inclusion. This was the commitment that we made that led to my husband’s re-entering active ministry as an Episcopal priest (having been a former Roman Catholic priest). This was the commitment that led me to spiritual direction for the third time in my life and this time to becoming a spiritual director myself.
Yesterday, Trinity Sunday rolled around again. The day that we celebrate the community that is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit…the Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier. Three persons in one God. The theology eludes me as the mystery enfolds me like fog or like clouds on a hilltop. What I love most is the community, the connectedness of these three Persons in one God. I am reminded, this Trinity Sunday of 2012, that it is never too late to start again. To live in community within myself, with those around me, with those I love and with those with whom I struggle. To live in the connectedness and in the blessing of hope and grace and peace. To commit again, to living in love…in the Holy One who lives in and loves each of us.
Beginning again, this day after Trinity Sunday, thankful as ever for apparent grace.
Made me feel renewed myself just reading your words—-thanks!
Kathy