The Most Holy Trinity, and Families

We are made unto the image and likeness of God, Scripture tells us. And from Augustine, through Saint Thomas, to Von Balthasar, and into our own time, the teaching of Scripture has moved the great souls to ponder and delight in this truth. It speaks of our dignity as creatures, and of our capacities as creatures called to  share the divine life. Augustine wrote of our memory, intellect and will as the created likeness that grace sharpens into image; Saint Thomas contemplated the flow of the word from the human mind as it understands something, and the spontaneous love that follows upon our understanding. And in this he saw an image of the Trinity. The Augustinian-Thomistic tradition looks inward and sees the human soul’s dynamic ability to know and to respond in love to what it knows. This is the likeness in us that mirrors, however opaquely, the dynamic in the Triune God. The Father knows himself perfectly in the Word, and the inner Trinitarian response to the beauty and goodness of the Word is the eternally concurrent flow of the Holy Spirit.

Building on this traditional perception of dynamic movement of knowledge and love in the Godhead itself, Von Balthasar, I think, provides an additional insight. Between human persons there is a flow of knowledge and love, and this interpersonal relationality bears also a kind of likeness to the Godhead. Let me try to illustrate in a clumsy but, I hope, not useless way, what Von Balthasar is aiming to have us contemplate.

Parents and Children: I sometimes think that parents don’t fully appreciate that the most important thing that they give their children, they give before they know they are giving it. Moms and Dads make spontaneously funny noises to their newborn children, and before long older brothers and sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins, grandmas and granddads are all doing the same thing. Goo, goo, goo, we say, or we make funny clicking sounds with our tongues. All of this is called nonsense, and hence no word at all, but they are words. A word is a sound that bears meaning, after all. These noises that we direct to babies are very meaningful, perhaps the most meaningful of all our human words. For they say to the child, “you have our attention, we love you, we are glad you are here.” The noises continue for some time, but there is a moment in the life of the family when someone says: “look, she smiled”. Inevitably, a grump in the room will say “no, she just burped.” But we all wait for the smile, because we want a response. It is the most natural thing in the world to want a baby to respond somehow to all our noises that mean “we love you” with a smile. And the smile says back to us: “I get the message, thanks, I love you too.”

I say this is the most important thing children receive from the adults around them because it assures them that the world is not a lonely place. It is a good place, where big people are looking out for you, and are giving you attention. A child does grow to know this. And a child does, sooner or later, give a smile in response. And the smile means exactly what we think it means: Thanks, I am glad to be here, and I love you too. To know we are loved is the prerequisite for knowing how to love back. It is the dynamic that makes human families strong, and life vibrant.

If we worry about what is going to happen to our kids in the future, we have only to ask ourselves how many children have no one to give them attention they need at the earliest moments, and beyond. The world does not have too many children; on the contrary, we have too many adults who have no time to make baby noises to the next generation when they are in the crib. Of course, it cannot stop with making baby noises; we need to accompany our young people with words and actions that continue to reinforce this fundamental truth: “you have our attention, we love you, and we want you to know that we are glad you are here.” We give this gift so that a baby or a young person can happily give a response, a smile in return. Without this dynamic in family and community life, human relations fall apart. Human beings simply cannot learn how to love unless they are loved first. Our love is always a response to a prior love that we have known and experienced.

This dynamic in human relations is also a way in which we mirror, however vaguely, the inner dynamic of God’s Trinitarian life. The Word is known by and knows the Father, and the Spirit is the love that eternally erupts in the knowledge of this sublime perfection of divine goodness. And it is this inner Trinitarian life that swoops down into our world in order to save us. For the Father has sent us his Word in the flesh, and his whole Person is an expression of the simple, irreplaceable truth that the Father loves us, that he has our attention, and that He is happy we are here. And we hear this Word directed toward us in Christ Jesus, and by holding fast to the mystery of faith, we get the message, and something spontaneously wells up in our hearts. This is the gift of the Spirit, who makes us able to smile back at the Father with a word of love.  

I hope it is not disrespectful to suggest that the mystery of faith is all about God directing baby noises to the human race, so that we can be assured in our childishness that someone really big is glad we are here, and that He is looking out for us. The sad alternative to responding with the smile of faith to these most meaningful of words is to live in this world with the unhappy thought that we are alone, orphans, abandoned and completely on our own. In Christ Jesus, my friends, we are given more than enough assurance that God has our attention.

As God is in himself, so He acts to save us. The Word breathes love, and knowledge of the Word causes love to spring up in us in its most graced manifestation. We were made in his image and likeness precisely so that we could grow in grace to know how much God loves us, and—in grace--  to love him in return. Amen.