Last Sunday we celebrated Trinity Sunday, so I want to offer you a couple of ideas to reflect upon, neither of which are my own! The first is my current favorite Trinitarian description, and it comes from Elizabeth Johnson in a Catholic Update she wrote titled, "Who is the Holy Spirit?" Johnson talks about the Trinity as God beyond us, God with us, and God within us. God beyond us refers to the first person of the Trinity and emphasizes the transcendence of God, the God who is incomprehensible mystery. Were God not beyond us, were we able to comprehend God, God would not be God, because God would then be something finite and graspable. Instead our God is infinite, and as such always beyond our finite minds. Karl Rahner talks about God as the horizon - we move closer but never arrive. He also talks about our asymptotic relationship to God. If you think back to your geometry classes, an asymptote is a curved line on a graph where the line continously approaches the axis, but will never actually touch the axis because the amount of space between the two can always be divided (click here for an image). While we never reach God by our own efforts, the good news is that we don't have to because God has reached us, God has drawn near to us. God with us refers to the second person of the Trinity, God Emmanuel, incarnate in Jesus Christ. God has entered into unity with humanity in the incarnation. At the end of Matthew's gospel, Jesus, Emmanuel, assures his followers,

"I am with you always, until the end of the age." Mt. 28:20

Finally God within us refers to the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit that dwells within us uniting us to the Father through the Son. Paul refers tells us,

"the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the holy Spirit that has been given to us." Romans 5:5

The second idea I want to leave with you is a passage from St. Athanasius, one of the early theologians who had a profound impact on the Church's understanding of the Trinity. This passage is part of the Office of Readings in the Liturgy of the Hours and is taken from Athanasius' First Letter to Serapion.

[T]he Father makes all things through the Word and in the Holy Spirit, and in this way the unity of the holy Trinity is preserved. Accordingly in the Church, one God is preached, one God who is above all things and through all things and in all things. God is above all things as the Father, for he is principle and source; he is through all things through the Word; and he is in all things in the Holy Spirit. . . . [W]hen the Spirit dwells in us, the Word who bestows the Spirit is in us too, and the Father is present in the Word. This is the meaning of the text: My Father and I will come to him and make our home with him. For where the light is, there also is the radiance; and where the radiance is, there too are its power and its resplendent grace.

This is also Paul's teaching in his second letter to the Corinthians: The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. For grace and the gift of the Trinity are given by the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit. Just as grace is given from the Father through the Son, so there could be no communication of the gift to us except in the Holy Spirit. But when we share in the Spirit, we possess the love of the Father, the grace of the Son and the fellowship of the Spirit. (Italics indicate quotation of Scripture.)