IN HIS IMAGE AND LIKENESS

A SERMON FOR TRINITY SUNDAY

Last year on Trinity Sunday, we turned our thoughts to Ireland.  We remembered how the patron saint of the Emerald Isle drove out the Triple Morrigans, those three she-devils who had possessed the land.  How he held up a simple shamrock, and taught the Irish people to worship the three Persons in one true God.  This year, we are saddened to see that the majority of those Irish people have voted to reject their faith in God by legalizing the murder of innocent babies in the womb, restoring their ancient druidical practice of child sacrifice to their pagan gods.  If only they had kept their eyes on the shamrock…  

Why?  Because the humble shamrock grows, with its three leaves, in the image and likeness of the Blessed Trinity.  In this it is perhaps the greatest example of how God created not only Man in his image and likeness, but the whole of creation.  Take a look at the great, vast universe around us, and see it for what it is. One unimaginably immense and complex creation in the image and likeness of God.   I don’t speak merely about the great sizeof the universe.  I don’t speak just about the complexity of its solar systems, its endless galaxies, the billions of stars and planets and moons, all with their various orbital paths, endlessly repeating through the ages.  No.  Today, I want us to look at something closer, something we can comprehend more easily, the natural world around us.  

This nature is nothing more than a reflection of its divine Creator.  It is a world composed of two elements or dimensions we encounter every minute of every day, and which in fact constitute the whole of our physical experience.  I speak of the dimensions of Space and Time.  Because right here in the very essence of what constitutes the natural world in which we live, in Space and Time our loving God has given us the key to a better understanding of the concept of the Blessed Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.  Sure, the Holy Trinity shall be forever a mystery to us.  But there is a key that can help us understand this mystery just a little bit better.  It is a key shaped like the number three, the very “shape”, if you will, of the Trinity itself.

Let’s start by looking at Space.  I don’t mean space in the sense of outer space.  But rather in the sense that everything we can see around us occupiesspace.  My toothbrush, the tree in the back garden, Mount Everest, the postman. They all take up space.  They all have dimensions.  And how many dimensions does everything have?  Three!  This is how we measure and perceive all material things.  We see and measure height, breadth, and depth.  Three dimensions.  Once you have a being with three dimensions it is a complete structure. Something with only two dimensions is not complete.  It is only a picture of a shape, a bunch of lines, a two-dimensional image of the real thing.  But give it a third dimension and it is complete.  It now occupies space.  The triangle has become a pyramid, the square is turned into a box.  Just as God is a Trinity of three persons in one God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, everything we see around us is a trinity of three dimensions, height, breadth and depth.

And now let’s take Time.  Just like space, Time is composed of three parts:  Past, Present and Future.  Everything we experience either has happened already, is happening now, or will happen in the future.  There are no other possibilities in time for something to happen.  And so we can say that past, present and future represent the totality of Time.  We cannot conceive of anything outside these three elements of time, any more than we can conceive of something occupying space that does not have height, breadth and depth.  

Space and Time, which really represent the whole of reality as we know it, were created by God as trinities. They were made on the first day of Creation, when God created light.  Light lit up the great void that had covered the face of the deep, so that it was no longer void but occupied space.  Light spread out at the speed of light, taking time to move from its source to eventually illuminate everything we can now see.  You can measure this speed, in miles per second, the miles being Space, the seconds Time.  

In his own image and likeness did God create man, and not only man but the whole universe of space and time as we know it.  Absolutely everything that we experience in our lives take place in this space and time that God created in his own image and likeness. Everything around us occupies the length, breadth and depth of space.  Every one of our thoughts, words and deeds occupies the time it takes to think, say or do them.  Even our sins of thought, word and deed take up our time.  And if we can only remind ourselves to see that faint glimmer of God in our sins, that spark of love that prevents us from losing him forever, we will surely repent our past sins by confessing them in the present, and resolving to sin no more in the future. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

And isn’t this the reason, after all, why God created the universe in his image and likeness?  So that we might find, if only we look for it, that image of God in everything we perceive with our five senses, and at every second of the day.  We can know God through his creation.  And if we know God, we must surely love him.  And that, of course, is the whole reason for creation in the first place.  That we can reciprocate the love that God has for us and unite with him forever in a world beyondtime and space.

God did not stop with these two trinities, time and space.  Trinities abound in our everyday life, and if only we stopped to contemplate these wonders for a moment, we would perhaps have a much better understanding of the Triune God.  When God created living creatures he made three types:  Angels, Men, and Animals.  At one end, Angels have an immortal soul but no body.  At the other the animals possess bodies but no immortal soul.  And Man, in between the two, has both a body and an immortal soul.  

Or if we look at only bodily creations, we can divide up everything we can see into Animal, Vegetable or Mineral.  Animal in this sense includes Man also, as well as any creature capable of locomotion.  Vegetable includes all plant life from the blade of grass to the mighty oak.  While Mineral is simply everything else:  the rocks, the dust of the earth, even man-made objects like a Styrofoam cup or a metal park bench.  Some people might prefer to divide these bodily things into another trinity of solid, liquid, and gas.  But either way, God created them so that everything we know fits into three categories.

If we look at the world of music, we find that all composers base their works on three things:  Melody, Harmony and Rhythm.  Or switch to the world of art, and you’ll find that painters are limited to just three primary colours, red, blue and yellow.  Try and imagine a colour which is not either a primary colour or a combination of these three primary colours.  It’s impossible for the human mind to invent or conceive of a new colour outside this spectrum!

All of this—and I could continue with many more examples—all of this is God’s good nature.  Nature the way God made it.  In his own image and likeness.  For just as surely as all these examples point to a totality of three which encompasses all possibilities, just so the Blessed Trinity is a totality of three Persons, complete and at peace within themselves, the whole and total concept and substance and essence of God himself.

The Devil, of course, will do his best to upset these trinities, although most of them form such an intricate part of the very essence of nature that he is incapable of doing toomuch harm.  But when the triple dimensions fall within man’s power to change, you can be sure the devil will tempt man to do just that.  Go back to the triple elements of music—melody, harmony and rhythm.  Listen to most modern music, and you’ll find that the element of melody, which is the most noble of these elements, has now often disappeared, dominated by the vulgar drumbeats of rhythm.  

More importantly, the three elements of the family—man, woman, children—have been overturned in every which way imaginable.  The link between man and woman is severed by divorce and ever worse perversions.  The link between parents and child is gradually disappearing, as families have fewer children thanks to abortion, contraception.  Feminism places a role in this too, as women move into the workplace and place increasing importance on a career rather than raising souls for God.  That perfect society of husband, wife and children is becoming the exception in our mad world.  How ironic that the Irish would vote for abortion on the very eve of Trinity Sunday!

And the Novus Ordo Church, what has it done to help the Devil undermine the fundamental relationship of Creation to Creator?  Take a look at the Mass.  What was the first trinity in the Mass they decided to rip out?  Was it perhaps the triple repetition of the Kyrie Eleison?  Or was it the triple Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, for each of our sins of Thought, Word, and Deed?    The constant triple repetitions in the Gloria in Excelsis Deohad to go of course.  As did the triple Domine, non sum dignusbefore Communion.  Each omission represented a watering down of the notion of the Blessed Trinity.

The last great sacrilege of this kind to be perpetrated on the poor folks of the Conciliar Church was done by John Paul II when he desecrated the Most Holy Rosary.  When the Blessed Mother appeared to St. Dominic, she gave him, in her great wisdom, 15 mysteries of the Rosary divided into three categories.  She knew that for those who do God’s will, life is composed of three chief elements, joy, sorrow, and eventual glory in heaven.  Sometimes, by the grace and mercy of God, we are blessed with joys.  But in this life, there’s no such thing as permanent joy.  These joys are nothing more than fleeting happiness, which passes and goes by.  And the sorrows of life replace them.  That’s all for the good.  It’s as it should be.  Because it’s by accepting these crosses, these sorrows, by accepting the will of God rather than our own, that these sorrows can then be transformed into eternal glory.  Joyful, sorrowful, and finally glorious.  And we see all this when we think about the chief events in the lives of Christ and his Blessed Mother.  This is why the Rosary is such a divinely inspired and essential instrument of prayer and heavenly grace.  

But clever old John Paul imagined in his arrogance that he could go one better than the Holy Virgin herself, and so he presented to the world the so-called Luminous Mysteries.  Named after the Illuminati sect of freemasonry, the idea was to illuminate, to enlighten our medieval triple notion of a life of joys, sorrows, and glories, and banish forever the “darkness” of this old-fashioned superstitious devotion to Our Lady, adding to it the notion that Man, with his great wisdom and power, has something to add to the nature created by God.  John Paul wanted to shed his light on what Our Lady had given us.  As if he could outshine the Star of the Sea!  He might just as well have tried to create a new colour, or to build a house without height or breadth or depth, or in fact to do anything at all outside of past, present or future.  To replace the three types of mystery of the Rosary with four, he might just as well have declared himself to be the fourth person of the Blessed Trinity.

Time and time again in his own lifetime, Our Lord gave us a triple reason for knowing of the existence of the Holy Trinity.  At his very birth, three wise men came from the Orient, bearing three gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.  In his life of 33 years, he spent three of them in his sacred ministry. And at the time of his Passion and Death, three times St. Peter denied Our Lord.  It took three nails to fasten Our Lord to the Cross, one through each of his hands and another through both his feet.  The words of the inscription above the Cross were written in three languages, Latin, Greek and Hebrew.  And most significantly of all, after spending three days in the tomb, on the third day Our Lord rose again from the dead.

I don’t want you to think that all this just amounts to some superstitious kind of numerology.  I point out this recurrence of the number three in the universe around us, in Christ’s life, and in our own lives, just as a reminder that God gives us signs in the things we can see and hear.   Signs in the visibleof things that are invisible, that we cannot see or hear, or even understand. Even the Most Blessed Trinity itself which is infinitely beyond our comprehension, can be imagined at least in a small part by observing the things around us.  This long list of threes, it represents the Holy Trinity, God himself in all his glory.  Because God is everywhere.  And he created this universe the way it is in order to show you that he is everywhere and in every aspect of our lives.  There is nowhere where he is not.

Meditate on these things.  We will find many other examples, and experience the joy of finding God in places we had not thought of, in every little corner of our life.  Today is not a day for asking things of God.  It is a day that has been set aside for one purpose only, and that is to adore God.  And therefore let us join with the holy Angels today as we sing our threefold Holy, holy, holy.  Let us join with the saints in singing our Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost.  And let us join with all the other sinners of this world as we come humbly to the Communion rail, repeating three times O Lord, I am not worthy. 

Yesterday was the last day of Eastertide, and after Vespers last night we began again our singing of the threefold daily Angelus.  When all is dark in this our world of sin, and when we cannot even see the signs of Blessed Trinity in all the things around us, perhaps when the cry of the Triple Morrigans echoes in the empty spaces of the night, let the triple incantation of Our Lady’s Prayer, the Angelus, remind us always of the might and power of our heavenly Father, the infinite mercy of her Son, and the love and blessings of the Holy Ghost.  Unto whom be the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever.  Amen.