Weekend Reflections for 6/14/19

Most Holy Trinity

On this Trinity Sunday we celebrate “divine” relationships, the music of the trinity that echoes in our Christian lives.

i)Divine Salvation: God’s mighty, saving works in history, especially our own salvation history.

ii)Divine Love, that gifts, lifts us, from slavery into freedom.

iii)Divine Grace as a gift we are called so share with others.

The Spiritual Exercises which we share in White House Retreats all echo the fundamental mystical experiences of St. Ignatius Loyola. Ignatius’s prayer was sometimes addressed separately to the Father, then the Son, then the Spirit. The“fourth” person Ignatius prayed to often was Mary, who inspired him with a mystical image of the unity of the trinity: “... while praying the office of Our Lady on the steps of [a] monastery, his understanding began to be raised up, in that he was seeing the Most Holy Trinity in the form of three musical keys, and this with so many tears and so many sobs that he could not control himself. And on walking that morning in a procession which was leaving from there, at no point could he restrain his tears until the mealtime, nor after the meal could he stop talking, only about the Most Holy Trinity.

"In St.Ignatius’s time, music tended more to simple harmonious chords rather than the discord so prominent in modern music, and that is how he resonated with the Holy Trinity. But for us today, perhaps the discord of our lives and world is also an invitation to let the music of the Trinity play on and on, especially through our“concert director” Ignatius and his symphony of Spiritual Exercises, where “Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his. To the Father through the features of men's faces.” (Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J.)

-Fr. Ted Arroyo, SJ