Midweek Message - The Trinity

 

This coming Sunday we celebrate the  Feast of the Trinity, glorifying God who has revealed himself as a trinity of persons in unity of substance; an infinitely loving communion into which we ourselves, in Christ and in the power of the Spirit, have been adopted:

THE disciples who were present at the Supper saw and heard Jesus Christ making eucharist to the Father over the bread and the cup.  They were witnesses of the intercourse between the Eternal Son and his Eternal Father.  Mortal ears and eyes at that moment perceived the movement of speech and love which passes in the heart of the Godhead; human minds entered into that converse of the Divine Persons which is the life and happiness of the Blessed Trinity.  Belief in the Trinity is not a distant speculation; the Trinity is that blessed family into which we are adopted.  God has asked us into his house, he has spread his table before us, he has set out bread and wine.  We are made one body with the Son of God, and in him converse with the Eternal Father, through the indwelling of the Holy Ghost. (Austin Farrer)

 

We are made one body with the Son of God, and in him converse with the Eternal Father, through the indwelling of the Holy Ghost. 

Reflect on the glory and power of that,

LSP

Midweek Message

 

While reflecting on Christ's words in the Gospel for this coming Sunday, "Abide in my love," (Jn 15:9) I was struck by this:

In 1944, the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko's mother took him from Siberia to Moscow. They were among those who witnessed a procession of twenty-thousand German war prisoners marching through the streets of Moscow:

The pavements swarmed with onlookers, cordoned off by soldiers and police. The crowd was mostly women -- Russian women with hands roughened by hard work, lips untouched by lipstick, and with thin hunched shoulders which had borne half of the burden of the war. Every one of them must have had a father or a husband, a brother or a son killed by the Germans. They gazed with hatred in the direction from which the column was to appear.

At last we saw it. The generals marched at the head, massive chins stuck out, lips folded disdainfully, their whole demeanor meant to show superiority over their plebian victors.

"'They smell of perfume, the bastards," someone in the crowd said with hatred. The women were clenching their fists. The soldiers and policemen had all they could do to hold them back.

All at once something happened to them. They saw German soldiers, thin, unshaven, wearing dirty blood-stained bandages, hobbling on crutches or leaning on the shoulders of their comrades; the soldiers walked with their heads down. The street became dead silent -- the only sound was the shuffling of boots and the thumping of crutches.

Then I saw an elderly women in broken-down boots push herself forward and touch a policeman's shoulder, saying, "Let me through." There must have been something about her that made him step aside. She went up to the column, took from inside her coat something wrapped in a colored handkerchief and unfolded it. It was a crust of black bread. She pushed it awkwardly into the pocket of a soldier, so exhausted that he was tottering on his feet. And now from every side women were running toward the soldiers, pushing into their hands bread, cigarettes, whatever they had. The soldiers were no longer enemies. They were people. (A Precocious Autobiography, Yevgeny Yevtushenko)

 

Abide in my love says Christ. What freedom, peace and joy there is to be had in that, as opposed to the tyranny, conflict and misery of its opposite. 

Let's choose wisely between these to paths and pray without ceasing that God's invincible love, his life, fills our hearts. Do not think for an instant that such a prayer won't be answered.

Here endeth the lesson,

LSP