At
home" Tony told me, "I am a kind of God. My wife gets very
insecure
if I am away too long. She and my children depend on me for food,
clothing, money for schooling, recreation, almost everything. I am
sometimes frightened by my own importance and shutter to think what
would become of them if anything happened to me.
"With
the community around it is different." He added, "I am involved
in the committee preparing for the Fiesta - I keep the books in order
- and I am part of our Bible sharing Group. I enjoy having a few drinks
with my friends. They need me and I need them, but I could survive
without them and they without me.
"It
is different again in the Bank in which I work. I am a cog in a wheel.
I carry out duties and fulfill roles that I had no part in designing.
I am powerless there and yet it is from there my power comes. If it
were not for my job I could not support my family.
"For
me family, community and work are very important but in different
ways and it is very difficult to keep a balance between the three.
Sometimes we have to do overtime in the office and I miss out on time
with the children. Sometimes, I know that my involvement in the community,
and even in church, is an escape from pressures at home. It is really
hard to keep them all in balance."
Today
we celebrate the Feast of the Holy Trinity and maybe Tony's story
can help us to get a little bit of a handle on this mystery.
In
the old Testament we are told that we are made in the image of God
and by the time the New Testament was written down the revelation
of the Trinity - a God who is one, yet, Father, Son and Holy Spirit
- had become clear. In today's Gospel Jesus sends the disciples out
to baptize, "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of
the Holy Spirit." The more we discover about God, the greater
becomes the mystery of God's presence and love. Mystery means that
we can never say the final word about God: there is always more to
discover and to experience. Each year as we celebrate the feast of
the Holy Trinity we get to grasp some new aspects of the reality that
is God.
In
the story of Tony we get some few very inadequate ideas about the
God in whose image we are made. Tony felt himself to be important,
a creator and a provider, at home. He felt in a way that he was a
kind of God for his family and maybe in just the same way we say that
God is Father for us. So too, Tony interacted with his neighbors.
It was a relationship of equality in which people took different roles.
God is also incarnate and amongst us as a brother and an equal. We
find him in listening to and responding to one another. Finally, in
his workplace Tony felt himself powerless and at the same time it
was from there he gained all of his power. So too, we can all at times
be overcome by our powerlessness and littleness and yet within us
there is a power, the power of the Spirit, to which we must be open
and responsive.
The
analogy of Tony's relationship with his family, his work, and with
the community in-between has its value but is also confusing, like
the mystery that it is trying to clarify. Is the workplace the center
with the family on the outside, or is the family the center with the
work on the outside? God's center is everywhere but his periphery
is nowhere!
In
today's feast we are asked to appreciate the different modes of God's
being, modes that we relate to by different ways of prayer. Our relationship
with the Father God is generally mediated through our words and rituals.
We try to hear and respond to the Son God mediated to us through the
world around us. When we meditate we try to Be with the Spirit God
in un-mediated stillness.
