It may surprise many to learn that Christian theology does not begin with the Most Holy Trinity. Christian theology begins with Jesus Christ. It is Christ who reveals God as Father. It is Christ who sends the Holy Spirit to remain present in, among, and through us. It is by means of the Holy Spirit that the Father and Son come to dwell in us.
Perhaps the best way to conceive of the Holy Spirit is as the love between the Father and the Son personified. When we contemplate the phrase that occurs twice in the span of eight verses in the fourth chapter of First John, “God is love,” lest it be narcissism, love requires a lover and beloved.1 Since love is profuse, that is, outward-looking, it bears fruit.
Love is at the heart of the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity. It is love that enables us to make sense of our profession of one God in three divine persons. Because love is fruitful, when someone has experienced the love of God through Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, which experience is what makes you a Christian, you are impelled to share this Good News.
In theological terms, a mystery isn’t something unknown. Rather, a divine mystery is known because God has revealed it. While we cannot apprehend divine mysteries by reason alone, what God reveals is not and cannot be contrary to reason.
This is why the best definition of theology remains the one given by Saint Anselm of Canterbury in the eleventh century: faith seeing understanding. Far from being unknowable, divine mysteries are endlessly knowable. No matter how much you know, grasp, understand, there is always more. One of the attributes of God, after all, is infinitude.
This is just what Jesus is getting at in today’s Gospel, which, again, is taken from the Last Supper Discourse from Saint John’s Gospel. By taking from what the Father has given Him, which is literally everything, the Son gives us the Spirit to guide us into all truth.2 All the Father had to reveal He revealed through the Incarnation of His Son. Here we are nearly 2,000 years later being drawn ever more deeply into the mystery of God in Christ by the Holy Spirit, who is the Spirit of truth.
Let’s not forget that, according to Sacred Scripture, “the mystery hidden from ages and from generations past… has [now] been manifested.” What is this mystery? “Christ in you.”3 Christ comes to be in you through the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit who, through our trials and tribulations, our woes and sufferings, our afflictions, produces genuine hope where otherwise there would be despair.
Hope is the most difficult of the three theological virtues to understand. One thing is certain; hope is not optimism. Hope lies on the far side of optimism. Hope is that tiny flickering flame that is left when your optimism has run out. Very often, optimism is about what I want. Hope, by contrast, is about seeking, knowing, doing and accepting God’s will come what may. It is the realization that my ways are not God’s ways.
I believe that philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was correct in his insistence that it is better to show than to say. This is what the saints do for us. Through their lives, they make what is abstract concrete. Their witness makes the metaphysical existential, the transcendent immanent, the hard to grasp graspable.
On Trinity Sunday 1925, a non-descript man was making his way up Granby Lane in Dublin, Ireland to attend Mass at Saint Savior’s church. While walking he collapsed. In the next day’s edition, the Irish Independent newspaper reported: “An elderly man collapsed in Granby Lane yesterday and, on being taken to Jervis Street Hospital, was found to be dead. He was wearing a tweed suit, but there was nothing to indicate who he was.”
Matt Talbot, used Under a Creative Commons License
Once at the hospital, while treating him, the doctors discovered that he had wound a chain around his waist and more chains around an arm and a leg, as well as cords around the other arm and leg. The chains found on his body at death were not weird self-torture. Rather, they were a symbol of his devotion to Mary, Mother of God, to whom he had entrusted himself completely. This man’s name was Matt Talbot.
Talbot was born into a relatively poor working-class family in Dublin. Like a lot of young men of that time and place, Matt started working full-time to help support his family at the age of twelve. His first job was with a wine merchant. To make a long story short, by the age of thirteen, he was considered a hopeless alcoholic.
Fifteen years later, broke and unable to drink on credit, Matt waited outside a pub he frequented hoping a friend would invite him in for a drink, a favor he had extended many times to broke friends. After several friends walked past him into the pub without inviting him in, he went home. Upon arriving home, Matt told his mother he was going “to take the pledge” and give up alcohol.
Matt followed through on his promise, pledging not to drink for three months. “The pledge” also consisted of making a general confession and attending Mass daily. At the end of three months, he took the pledge for another six months and then for life. Through an austere, prayerful, penitential manner of life, he remained sober for the rest of his life, right up until that Trinity Sunday when he collapsed on Granby Lane.
As it turned out, Matt was not hopeless. Hope was all he had. It was through his affliction that he came to understand hope, to live in hope. “It’s as hard to give up the drink as it is to raise the dead to life again,” he noted. “But” he insisted, “both are possible and even easy for our Lord. We have only to depend on him.”
The first several years of his sobriety were very difficult for Matt. But he prayed, attended Mass, went to confession, read and learned about his faith, supported the missions and charities from his modest earnings. In other words, he made use of the means of grace that Mother Church provides for all her children. During two general strikes, being single and living a very austere life, Matt gave money to fellow strikers who were married with children.
After he sobered up, Matt sought to repay all his debts. Once, while in the throes of alcoholism, Talbot stole a fiddler’s fiddle and sold it for money to buy booze. After he was in his right mind, he searched for the fiddler whose instrument he stole to pay him back. He failed to find him and so he gave the money to have a Mass said for the man whose livelihood he took.
Venerable Matt Talbot became a beacon of hope. He led an austere life of deep, even mystical prayer. But apart from knowing that he was “religious” and went to Mass a lot, his fellow workers, neighbors and even his siblings did not really understand the depth of his sanctity until after his death. He was quiet, soft-spoken, unremarkable, unassuming, someone who’s yes meant yes and no meant no. In the eyes of the world, he was literally a nobody.
Of course, not every Christian (or even most Christians) is called to live a life of extreme penance like Matt Talbot. We are, however, called to place our hope in Christ with the same love and devotion, to have the same commitment to our Savior, recoginizing our need and honoring what He has done for us.
And so, you don’t need to look for the Trinity up in the sky, or in some abstract philosophical construct, as useful as these can sometimes be. God is always right in front of you, if you have eyes to see. Another of God’s attributes is omnipresence. Being a Christian is an existential commitment, a commitment to living each day in what is now and has always been a peculiar way. Genuine hope is weird. As Flannery O'Connor put it: "You shall know the truth and the truth will make you odd."
Walking with the Lord can sometimes seem like a dry and dusty path to nowhere. But Venerable Matt Talbot, along with other holy women and men, shows us what it means to walk the road of faith, which gives us access to the grace in which we stand.
1 1 John 4:8.16.↩
2 John 16:13.↩
3 Colossians 1:26-27.↩
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