SCHOENSTATT SCOTLAND: FEAST OF THE MOST BLESSED TRINITY
May 22nd 2016, and the Annual Procession in Honour of Our Lady, Queen of the May.
On this glorious Solemnity of the Holy Trinity, and the honouring of Our Lady as the Queen of the May, I was invited by the Schoenstatt Sisters of Mary to preside at the Mass of the Feast, and at the Crowning of the image of Our Lady Thrice Admirable in the little Shrine within the lovely grounds of the House. Groups of pilgrims came throughout the day, including a number of Polish parishioners from St. Anne’s Dennistoun, Glasgow, accompanied by their priest.
Associating the two themes of the Day’s Liturgy was challenging, but I was comforted to find that our First Reading for the Solemnity of The Holy Trinity (in Year C of the Lectionary) is taken from the Book of Proverbs, and is a Reading in a list deemed by the Church’s liturgy as suitable for a feast of Our Lady. It is from the Book of Proverbs (8, 22 – 31): It provided the basis for my Homily:
“The Wisdom of God cries aloud: The Lord created me when his purpose first unfolded, before the oldest of his works. From everlasting I was firmly set, from the beginning, before earth came into being”.
Who is speaking? – “The Wisdom of God”! Who is that?
It is of course a personification- namely a thing, a virtue, a truth, an event, given a name like to a person so that it can be treated as if it were so, and speak as if it were so. Of course we might be tempted to say that the Wisdom of God personified in this passage from the Book of Proverbs is the Holy Spirit: “Come Holy Spirit” we pray, “Fill the hearts of the faithful and kindle in them the fire of thy love”. Jesus at the Last Supper promised his disciples the gift which would lead them into the “whole truth”. But that gift is more than a grace; it is the Holy Spirit, Uncreated Grace.
The Holy Spirit, the same who came upon Jesus at his baptism, is not created. We profess in the Creed: “I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son; who with the Father and Son is adored and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets”. When the voice of the Father was heard on that same occasion, we had a revelation of the Most Holy Trinity.
So who is speaking, or what is personified as a speaker, when we hear “the deep was not when I was born; before the mountains were settled, before the hills I came to birth”? It is something, someone, who antedates the creation itself, and is not created.
So we might think of the “Wisdom of God” in Proverbs as the Word of God, namely the Son of the eternal Father, who existed from all eternity, “God from God, Light from Light, true God from True God, begotten not made, consubstantial –of One Being- with the Father” as we declare in the Creed.
We continue in the Creed to profess; “Through Him all things were made”. Surely then He is “ the Wisdom of God who cries aloud” in this magnificent statement about creation. But he is not created, nor “the oldest of (God’s) works”, albeit that He was “by His side, a master craftsman, delighting in Him day after Day, ever at play in His presence, at play everywhere in the world, delighting to be with the sons of men”.
Here Trinitarian Theology comes to our help.The theologians speak of the Son of God as the One whom the Father forever loved, in whom He saw His own perfect image, and the source of every perfection in what out of love for His Beloved Son he created, so that it might share the life of which the Godhead is the only source.
The way to think of it is by the image of a seal which leaves its imprint on what it stamps. We can see in the goodness and beauty of creation the stamp which God has put on it, reflecting something of the likeness of God himself. Since that seal is the Son, He, uncreated, existed “before earth came into being”. The stamp is creation, and as such it can be personified, and speak of its being created “when his purpose first unfolded”. The humanity of Jesus is part of God’s creation which cries aloud “The Lord created me”.
Further reflection leads us on to the very purpose of the Incarnation, of the Son becoming man and entering the created world, sharing its created nature in his humanity, and seeking to restore it to what the Father intended. Through original sin, in which we all participate – through the endorsement we give by our own misuse of our freedom, by our own sins, it needed to be redeemed.
It is into this scenario, as part of the unfolding of the divine purpose, that Mary comes, chosen by God from the beginning to be the perfect response to his call to perfection. In the Apocalypse she is shown to us as a sign in the Heavens, clothed with the Sun, with the moon under her feet, themselves the symbols of the light which the whole of creation rejoices in, a created emanation of the Divine Light.
It is in this context that the answer to Bernadette’s question to the lovely vision she sees in the niche of Massabielle, “Who are you?”, begins to make sense to us; “I am the Immaculate Conception” – part of God’s eternal plan.
Of course we mortals have greater ease when we compare the divine to our own natural relationships, which God has allowed when, prompted by the indwelling Spirit of God, we cry out “Abba, Father”. Likewise we hail Mary as “Mother of the Church” –and not just its image.
Mary is Mother, our Mother thrice admirable and blessed, on whom we call in all our needs, and especially so that we ourselves may be stamped with the Holy Spirit, “ sealed “as the Sacrament of Confirmation expresses it, “with the gift of the Holy Spirit”.
Then to an extent we too can call out “the Lord created me when his purpose first unfolded” as the Apostle Paul declared in his letter to the Ephesians: “It is in Him, the Lord Jesus, that we were claimed as God’s own, chosen from the beginning under the predetermined plan of the One who guides all things as he decides by his own will , chosen to be, for his greater glory, the people who would put their hopes in Christ before He came”, and before He comes again! –All part of God’s work of art!
+Mario, Emeritus Archbishop of Glasgow.
(You will be able to view many of the wonderful images taken on the day on Schoenstatt Scotland Facebook)
