A Book Sale on Trinity Sunday!

 

We are having a book sale today to support our parish pilgrims heading off to World Youth Day next month. I had decided it was time to downsize my personal library. To tell the truth, I didn’t have much choice—there’s no room for two-thirds of my books in my new home.

It’s been painful. Letting go of books given to me by friends now deceased, books inscribed to me by their authors, and books that remind me of my failures, like “Teach Yourself New Testament Greek” or “Lose Twenty Pounds in Just Three Weeks”!

But it’s also been prayerful. Some of these books are milestones on my spiritual journey. Some have helped me develop my adult view of life and love.

This is why there are some books I’ll never give away. At the top of the list is one that a dear priest friend gave me when I entered the seminary, called The Spiritual Life of the Priest, by an Irish abbot named Eugene Boylan.

In that book I discovered the best-kept secret of our Catholic faith: that “God, by grace, resides in the soul as in a temple, in a most intimate… manner.”

Those aren’t even Abbot Boylan’s words; he’s quoting an encyclical on the Holy Spirit by Pope Leo XIII. In other words, the teaching that rocked me wasn’t anything new; it’s solid Catholic teaching. But no one ever told me about it.

This teaching may be called the indwelling of the Holy Trinity in the Christian soul.

The abbot states this awesome truth in simple words: “When a soul… is in a state of grace, when a soul is supernaturally alive, God is in that soul.”

“He dwells in our souls, giving them life, making them share in some way in his own nature.”

Now this is a teaching with consequences. Leo XIII said that the presence of the Trinity unites the soul “more so than a friend is united to his most loving and devoted friend, and enjoys God in all fulness and sweetness.”

It doesn’t get any better than that this side of heaven. So why don’t we talk more about the indwelling presence?

“Children seem to get it,” one Catholic blogger observed. “They seem to understand that God dwells in their hearts.  Of course, if you asked them how they know this they may look at you with a confused look and not know how to respond.  But somehow they do understand that God dwells within them.”

For adults it may take a bit more thought. God’s ultimate plan is our eternal unity with him. But the Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us that “even now we are called to be a dwelling for the Most Holy Trinity” and it offers the words of Jesus as proof: “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.”

Eugene Boylan says we have sound authority for believing that we should enjoy God in our souls. But he asks, “what about our practice?” Do we in fact enjoy Him? Certainly we can’t if we don’t recognize him.

Today’s feast is our invitation to acknowledge and welcome the divine presence within us—to take a big step on our spiritual journey if we haven’t already.

The one-sentence summary of my short homily on this Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity comes straight from The Spiritual Life of the Priest but it applies to every single baptized person: “We look for God outside of ourselves, and all the time he is within.”

I am sure each of us is aware that God is fully present to us every time we receive Holy Communion. But let’s never forget that after his divine presence in our bodies is gone, his divinity remains in our souls—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.