Cantalamessa homily: Enter into the mystery of the Trinity

In our days, it is particularly relevant to “revisit the Fathers of the Church, not only to understand the content of the Faith in its earliest form, but even more, to rediscover the vital unity between faith as it is professed, and faith as it is lived – between the thing itself, and its enunciation.”

The connection between a professed faith and a lived faith was at the heart of Father Raniero Cantalamessa’s second Lenten homily. In his sermon, the Preacher of the Pontifical Household called upon his hearers to enter fully into the mystery of our Faith, and especially the mystery of the Holy Trinity. He took as his guide St. Gregory Nazianzus, the great 4^th century Doctor of the Church, whom he described as a “Master of Faith in the Trinity.”

The Trinity, Fr. Cantalamessa said, is not simply an abstract truth, not only a dogma, but a reality that makes the heart sing. Faced with the mystery of one God in three Divine Persons, he said, St. Gregory adopted the language of St. Augustine, who spoke of God as Love: “Love pre-supposes one who loves, one who is loved, and love itself. In the Trinity, the Father is the one who loves, the font and principle of all things; the Son is the one who is loved; the Holy Spirit is the love with which They love.”

Father Cantalamessa continued: “St. Gregory Nazianzen should have aroused in us an ardent desire for the Trinity: to make It "our" Trinity, the "dear" Trinity, the “beloved" Trinity. Some of these accents of heartfelt adoration and astonishment ring out in the texts of the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity. We must allow them to pass from the liturgy into our lives! Is there anything more blessed that we can do in respect of the Trinity than to search to understand It, to enter into It? We can not embrace the ocean, but we can get into it; likewise, we can not embrace the mystery of the Trinity with our minds, but we can enter into it!”