The immature and self-orienting love of Romeo and Juliet leads them to a tomb, and later their kinsfolk join their corpses in the crypt and weep. Thier unbridled affection has dealt more death than all the ancient duels between Montague and Capulet. It ends both family lines by cutting off both house’s heirs. Though it had promised to endure forever, worldly love leads us to the grave.
Read moreLove keeps time
Immature lovers say in the fever of early attraction: “I wish this moment could last forever.”
Read moreThe lives of others all over your own
What is hospitality if not the act of getting the lives of other people all over your own? …
Read moreUtterly despised
It is because, in thinking that Love is the kind of thing that wealth can buy, that person reveals they do not in fact value love as highly as they appear.
Read moreLove covers the body from profanation
Leaving behind us for a moment all of the wearied and wheel-rutted arguments for and against “modesty” and all of the recent condemnations of “purity culture” I want to consider, if only in passing on this Monday morning, the nature of “the veil” —by which I mean here anything drawn across the body in order to give it a glory and a covering.
Read moreLove suffers death
The singers of the Song of Solomon proclaim that “love is stronger than death” (Songs 8:6). It is precisely this quality that makes love what it is. Love is the things that is capable of laying-down its life for the beloved and then rising again.
Read moreImbalances of power between friends
Christ calls his disciples “friends” and astounds them, for the power relations are steep (Jn. 15:14).
Read moreTrinity Sunday
Yesterday, as we gathered for our first Sunday service, we observed the celebration of the Holy Trinity, one of the major feasts in the liturgical cycle. But what makes this day “feast-able”? It seems, unlike the other liturgical days, to be unconnected to any meaningful part of the drama of salvation. Is it just a day on which Christians commemorate a dogmatic formula?
No. Rather, as Hans Urs von Balthasar explained:Today’s feast joins the others, not as the recalling of some particular, recondite mystery that needs to be brought to mind once a year but as the sum of them all…” The celebration of the Holy Trinity finally allows “us to see together, in a unity, what up to now we saw as a colorful spectrum of broken light.” It makes sense of all of the various feasts and fasts of the liturgical year precisely because it reveals the underlying nature of the God who brought about all of those diverse events.
It shows us, back behind each turning of the drama of salvation and the drama of history, the image of Triune Love. Love like this is possible only because the God who is Love, is triune.
To borrow the language of philosophy, Trinity Sunday permits the paradoxes, the mysteries, and the glories of the Christian Story because the Author is himself divine paradox. For Trinity Sunday recalls that God is neither “Being Itself” nor “a being within Being Itself” but that God is, to borrow again from Balthasar “Being With”.
What a Triune God makes possible is the triumph of love. For it the God of creation is a Triune God then love becomes ontologically preeminent. Love is the nature of the Triune Godhead. Love is stronger than death; love it stronger than power. And this truth, as the Psalmist (29, “Afferte Domino”) says —in all of its theological, social, and political ramifications— is earth shaking, shattering citadels of pride, thundering the wild places of Kadesh, and shocking the rugged heights of Sirion.
Over the next season, called “Ordinary Time” or the “Season After Pentecost”, this Triune love continues to work mightily among us in a very oblique way and crescendos in the Feast of All Saints. On that day, much forgotten or rubbished by us in recent times, we bear witness to how the Triune Love of God has been poured into the lives of the People of God. These Feats are paired in this way. We have once again declared that the God of Love is only a God of Love because He is Triune, and now we are commissioned to live as a Triune People; in mutual charity, surrender, and fellowship.