“The Schack,” a novel by William Paul Young which became the No. 1 fiction on the New York Times’ bestsellers list from June 2008 to early 2010, narrates a profound experience in Mackenzie “Mack” Allen Phillips’ life.
Mack’s story took place over a weekend in “the shack.”
In a family outing in the beautiful outdoors of Oregon, Mack’s youngest daughter, Missy, is abducted. As they desperately search for her, evidence is found in a shack deep in the woods that Missy might have been murdered, but her body is missing.
Years later, Mack receives a strange invitation back to the shack signed by “Papa.” The weekend in the shack forever changes Mack’s life as he spends it with Papa, Jesus and Sarayu—the Trinity.
Mystery
When he first meets Papa, Mack asks, “But what difference does it make that there are three of you, and you are all one God? Did I say that right?”
Mack’s question is the same as ours: “Did I say that right?” The Trinity is one of the most difficult mysteries of our Christian faith. The mystery of three persons in one God is what we celebrate today, Trinity Sunday.
But more than understanding its abstruseness, the real question is, “What difference does it make?”
To Mack’s question, Papa responds: “It makes all the difference in the world! We are not three gods, and we are not talking about one god with three attitudes, like a man who is a husband, father and worker. I am one God and I am three persons, and each of the three is fully and entirely the one.”
Mack, like us, seemed more confused by this explanation. So Papa continues, “…If I were simply one God and only one person, then you would find yourself in this creation without something wonderful, without something essential even.”
Mack continued to be somewhat perplexed, but started to feel a sense of peace within him.
Starting point
Love within us is our starting point. In my work as a teacher and conducting formation sessions for teachers, I realized that a process we pay little attention to is learning to love oneself. I believe this is partly due to our cultural and maybe religious milieu that makes loving oneself almost synonymous to being self-centered or, worse, being egotistic.
As St. Paul says, we are able to love because God loved us first. Our ability to love ourselves is knowing that God loved us; we are loved and loved greatly by God.
As one great song popularized by George Benson and Whitney Houston puts it, “Learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all.”
Learning to love oneself comes from learning how much God loves us unconditionally. The change factor is us and never God’s love.
When I ask people in seminars to choose their one most important blessing in life, at least 90 percent say it is their family.
This leads us to the next important element of the mystery of the Trinity—the sense of family or community, whose core and nature is love.
Greatest commandments
Last Friday, the Gospel for the day was about the exchange between Christ and the Pharisees on the question of divorce. I told the community at Mass that more than the legalistic nature of the text, Christ was really pointing us back to the original inspiration of the law—the relationship between God and humanity.
This was renewed in Christ and through Christ we have the greatest commandments: Love the Lord above all else; and love our neighbor as ourselves.
I was telling the community that more than the two greatest commandments, there were really three in this declaration: Love God, love others and love ourselves.
This is the love that builds community. The love that Papa calls “wonderful, essential” and if we are to follow further his discourse: “Love and relationship. All love and relationship is possible for you only because it already exists within me, within God myself.”
This is the grace and the call—the challenge—of Trinity Sunday, to build loving communities. It begins with that relationship within us: God loving us, realizing we are loved, loving ourselves, and loving God in return and loving others.
Let me end with a story about Ignatius of Loyola. When his original plan to go to and live in the Holy Land did not materialize, Ignatius eventually made his way to Rome to put himself at the disposal of the church.
On the road, he had a great vision at La Storta, a town northwest of Rome. While there, Ignatius had a vision of God the Father confirming his journey and promising to him that He will “be propitious to him in Rome.”
Ignatius’ arrival in Rome signaled the birth of his community, the Society of Jesus, which Time magazine called in the 1970s as the “most remarkable group of men in the church since the 12 apostles.”
All communities formed by the Trinity will be remarkable, “wonderful,” as it is love and thus a reflection of the Trinity.