Love Among and Within Us.

The astounding truth about the Trinity is that it is the perfect realization of perfect love. God’s secret is this: There is “I and thou” without “mine and thine.” The Father is not the Son; the Son is not the Father; the Holy Spirit is neither the Father nor the Son. Each is a real person. And still there is no “mine and thine,” no egoism. The Father gives to the Son literally all that He Himself has, all that makes Him God, all that makes Him Love. The Son, perfect image of the Father, loves the Father to selfless perfection. And, marvel beyond comprehension, the love with which Father and Son love each other, that love is a person. That love is the Holy Spirit.

But God’s love does not hide in outer space. Perfect love has touched our earth; we glimpse it in the life God shared with us. The Father, John declares, “so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (Jn 3:16). The Son, Paul lyricizes, did not think His glory something to cling to, a prize to clutch. He took our bone and marrow, our skin and sinews. Not because He needed them. He took what is ours only to give us what is His, to let us share God’s life, God’s glory.

And the Holy Spirit? The Spirit is not only the love between Father and Son; the Spirit is God’s Gift to you and me. “If I leave you,” Jesus said the night before Calvary, “it is only to send you my Spirit, to be with you always, to teach you all truth, to be my Presence among you, my Presence within you” (cf. Jn 16:7-15).

Fr. Walter J. Burghardt, Lovely in Eyes Not His. Taken from Give Us this Day.

Fr. Walter Burghardt, SJ (1914–2008), spent much of his career as a scholar of Church history and theology. He was a spellbinding preacher whose powerful calls for social justice and understanding influenced generations of priests and pastors.