JUNE42023

You sometime hear the objection that the Catholic Church has too many doctrines and dogmas. The earliest Christians were faithful without them. Which is true (it took several centuries for what the definition of the Trinity as taught in our catechisms to be formated) but not the whole story.  The reason that doctrines came to be defined in the Church was because some error or misconception needed to be corrected. St. Paul provided the Biblical description of God as Trinity: The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with all of you. We see in Paul’s words an understanding that God in the very being of God is a relationship, is a community of persons. If God is a royal monarch, seated in glorious isolation above it all that our relationship with God is a strictly vertical one of servile obedience. By wrestling with a proper understanding of the divine nature (admittedly one that is always more incorrect than correct since our limitations make a full understanding of God impossible) the Church discovered that fidelity to God demands more than thinking of me down here and God up there. It demands taking relationship as our way of reflecting divine life. That is why St. Paul, before giving his Trinitarian blessing, describes our relationships in a way that reflects the nature of God. Mend your ways, encourage one another, agree with one another, live in peace, and the God of love and peace will be with you. Greet one another with a holy kiss. This is not good advice for getting along, but our entry point into connecting with God.