05/29/2026
Fr. Greg Caldwell's bulletin letter of May 31, 2026
“The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.” – G.K. Chesterton
The Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, a feast looking to the mystery of God in Himself, One God, three persons. A mystery to be contemplated, the central mystery of the faith; it is a mystery that, while never contrary, goes beyond reason, for it is the mystery of God’s inner life. Yet, for all of its centrality, many a catechist worries about the day that the Trinity comes up in class, knowing the difficulty. I have even heard the joke of Trinity Sunday as “heresy sunday” because of the difficulty of explaining the Trinity. Books sometimes like to push the Trinity off to the side as a separate question for later. Many a Catholic turns to the solution to the challenge of not thinking about the Trinity too much.
However, this is not an option, for one cannot consider the Christian faith without the Trinity. The incarnation is the incarnation of the second person. Last week, on Pentecost, we looked at the descent of the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity. The Triune God created, our end is found in the Triune God. All of our prayer is rooted in the Trinity. We start prayers with the Sign of the Cross, invoking the Trinity. We often end prayers with the Sign of the Cross or with a doxology again invoking the Trinity. The Mass is always offered to the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit, being totally Trinitarian.
Yet, as we look at the Trinity, the difficulty of understanding it, there is the point that G.K. Chesterton looks to make. This is not a mystery to be solved, but one to be contemplated, our goal is not to fit a “solution” into our heads, but put our heads into the heavens. If we have an understanding of God that fits into our heads, we know we have made an error. As Jean Luc Marion notes, that is not God, but an idol. As we celebrate this feast, let us put our heads into the heavens contemplating this central mystery, that of God in Himself, the One who created us in His likeness and image, the One who has called us back to Himself.
In Christ,
Fr. Greg Caldwell
