Do you want to become more like your parents as you grow older?
Well, whether you want to or not doesn’t make much of a difference. If you have their DNA and/or were raised by them, your parents are an inescapable part of your future. We have this familial resemblance because we are begotten and reared by parents. Parents participate in God’s creation by giving us genetic material and impressing themselves on us as our neural systems are formed. This is an important image of God, but it is also very different because we were made and God is not made – he is a communion of Persons, like a family, but the Father’s begetting of the Son and their spiration of the Spirit are actions within his eternal being. No Person of the Most Holy Trinity is created.
For most Catholics in an English-speaking country, the mention of the Trinity probably brings to mind St. Patrick and a shamrock, from the apocryphal story that he used a three-leafed plant as an image of the Trinity. It is one of many analogies arising from the well-intentioned desire to explain the Trinity in simple terms, especially to children: God is like the sun, a star with light and heat; God is like water, that can be solid, liquid, or gas; God is like a plant with three leaves. Unfortunately, these analogies are more problematic than helpful – God’s being is not the same as his effects; God’s being is not transformation into different forms; God’s being is not divided between different tasks; God’s being does not have parts.
There is nothing in created nature that enables us to understand God’s tripersonal being. It is entirely beyond human experience, and there is no way we could ever have concluded from reasoning that God is three Persons. We only know this because God chose to reveal his inner life to us. A human person is also a mystery: we observe a person from the outside, but only know his inner life if he chooses to share it with us, and even then, a person cannot be reduced to an explanation. God has shared the mystery of himself with us, and while we may not be able to explain his inner life, we can already experience the eternal joy of knowing him in the three Persons of the Godhead.
We encounter the triune God whenever we pray “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” Whenever a baptized person prays, it is by the Holy Spirit poured into our hearts (Romans 8:26-27). We can know about Jesus indirectly from history, but we can know him directly through prayer. And the Spirit and Son bring us to the Father.
-Fr. Nate
