SHORT FEATURE: ST. PATRICK’S BAD ANALOGIES

Who knew the Lutherans could be funny? Well, it turns out they can, except for, you know, those occasional times when they’re being materially heretical and all that. But still, this short currently making the rounds is pretty good…

If you’re like me, you probably heard at least one of these analogies during the homily on Trinity Sunday. Not that I’m blaming any priest for using them because I sure can’t come up with any better ones myself. It’s like the Catechism says, “The Trinity is a mystery of faith in the strict sense, one of the ‘mysteries that are hidden in God, which can never be known unless they are revealed by God’. To be sure, God has left traces of his Trinitarian being in his work of creation and in his Revelation throughout the Old Testament. But his inmost Being as Holy Trinity is a mystery that is inaccessible to reason alone or even to Israel's faith before the Incarnation of God's Son and the sending of the Holy Spirit.”

The Trinity is like a cold splash of water in the faces of theologians, be they professionals or the armchair variety like myself. It’s just not something you can sit at a desk and noodle out on paper. The mystery of the Trinity is something which ultimately must be experienced, not solved. Or as Pope Francis put it yesterday, the Trinity “is not the product of human reasoning, it is the face which God himself revealed, not from the top of a throne, but walking with humanity in the history of the people of Israel, and above all in Jesus of Nazareth.” Know Jesus and you’ll know the Trinity.