A week and a bit too early!

There is only One God in Perfect Trinity and Perfect Unity, but there seem to be several lesser holy trinities which point to the true Holy Trinity. St Paul's Faith, Hope and Love spring to mind as does St John's Spirit, water and blood. One could say that SS Peter, James and John also form a holy trinity, but that could be stretching the point: they form a triad rather than a trinity. Faith, Hope and Love seem to form a trinity because they seem to have separate identities but the same essence. The way St John speaks of Spirit, water and blood as separate entities yet sharing a unifying testimony, is a lesser trinity than that of Faith, Hope and Love, since their unity of essence is less obvious.

In my mind, there is another holy trinity. The Venerable Bede mentions in a sermon of his that the Peace "which the world cannot give" can only come about through Love. It seems to me that God provides us with a conceptual mirror of His existence in the relationships between Truth, Peace and Love, since all three are the same thing but have a separation and uniqueness of themselves.

God tells us that Love is the source of all things. It is because of Love that God creates all that is. Truth bears witness to the fact that Love exists and is real and, when it comes into contact with what has been created, Truth bears witness to the reality of Creation and the act of its creation in love. The Creature finds Peace only when it has the assurance of Truth of its creation in Love.

So we find ourselves as restless beings in various forms of agony: a cold numbness of complacency, a feverish endeavour to control things and people, a furious pushing away of that which challenges our perceptions and seeks to unseat us from our confidence that what we hold is true, a sickly obsession to finding an anodyne in what is created, and a nausea of believing that others possess the truth, love and peace that we deserve.

A search for the Truth brings Peace through Love. A desire for Peace can only be found in True Love, and Love can only ever lead us to Peace through the revelation of what is True.

Ἀγαπητοί, νῦν τέκνα θεοῦ ἐσμεν, καὶ οὔπω ἐφανερώθη τί ἐσόμεθα. οἴδαμεν ὅτι ἐὰν φανερωθῇ ὅμοιοι αὐτῷ ἐσόμεθα, ὅτι ὀψόμεθα αὐτὸν καθώς ἐστιν.

Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.

I John iii.2

Because we were created in love, we ourselves bear in ourselves the Truth of our reality. We do seem to get confused by this, in that we can confuse our truth as an existence separate from other people, or to convince ourselves that the truth can only ever be reached by certain reductionist techniques. Our truth is totally subordinate to the Truth precisely because our truth is the Truth. The Truth of our reality can only be the Truth that God is. We seem more to be obsessed with the tiny diamonds of Truth that permeate our understanding, hoarding them, protecting them, polishing them and examining them rather than realising that these tiny fragments are merely the intersections of the Truth with our empirical reality.

The Church really does possess this Truth, because the Truth is God Himself, yet she only possesses Him in the sense that He desires the embrace of His Bride and yields to that embrace. Yet, at each instant in time, all we will be able to perceive of the Truth are the fragments we have so far collected, and the fragments that we are finding now. Our possession can never be an ownership, merely an experience of Divine Love.

Yet if the Lord Christ tells us that He is the Truth, if St John tells us that God is Love, and the Saviour also describes the Holy Ghost as a comforter, a bringer of Peace, then the trinity of Love, Truth and Peace offer us an active way of living out our belief in God as lovers, peacekeepers and proper scientists.