Anatomy of Eternal Light

Sermon for Trinity Sunday

Did you watch the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex? Perhaps then, you might remember that the bride walked into the Chapel to the music “Eternal Source of Light Divine” by Handel. You might not be very familiar with that. It was composed for the birthday of Queen Anne in 1713. The words, written by Ambrose Philips, run as follows:

Eternal Source of light divine,
With double warmth Thy beams display,
And with distinguished glory shine,
To add a lustre to this day.

Contained in this verse, we can discover the foundation of our Catholic Faith whether or not Philips intended it to be so.

How does this work?

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Here on Trinity Sunday, we have a duty to reflect upon the incomprehensible existence of God. Today, we have the opportunity to rejoice in the fact that God must go beyond our understanding, that He must confound our thinking. In order to see this, we must start with what we know.

We believe in God the Father Almighty.

If we start here, then we are acknowledging at least three things. First, that we do believe in God. Second, that He is a Father. Third, that He can do all that is possible to do.

He is the Father, and this is significant. If He is a Father then He must have at least one child. He must be the reason why someone else exists. He is a source – the Eternal Source.

We believe in Jesus Christ, His Son, Our Lord. If Jesus is the Son of God, then He is the reason why His Father is God. Furthermore, we believe that Our Lord Jesus is the only Son of God. As children of our parents, we know that there was a time when we did not exist. We call that “before we were born”. However, we believe that He is the Son but that He was born of the Father in Eternity. This means that Our Lord Jesus is Himself Eternal and, like His Father, there has never been a time when He did not exist. As the Christmas Carol says of Jesus, He is “Very God, begotten, NOT created.” Because the Father and Son are linked very closely, we see that they must both be fully Divine. Jesus tells us that He is the Light of the World, and His Father is the Eternal Source of Light Divine. The Father is God. The Son is God.

But there is only one God. So the Son is fully God and the Father is fully God. But the Father is not the Son. That’s where things begin to go beyond our understanding.

[PAUSE]

Let’s continue.

We believe in the Holy Ghost, too. We know Him as the Lord and Giver of Life. He is the Breath of God Who is there from the very beginning. He is breathed out by the Father and that is what we mean when we say that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father. Again, this happens in Eternity apart from any created Time. Does the Holy Ghost proceed from the Son?

We see that Jesus breathes out the Holy Ghost on His disciples just before His Ascension into Heaven. However, this is in Time. To ask when the Father brought forth His Son doesn’t make sense because this happens outside of Time. To ask when the Father breathes out the Holy Ghost doesn’t make sense because that happens outside of Time as well. We can say when Jesus breathes out the Holy Ghost, so this means that it isn’t eternal. The Holy Ghost does not eternally proceed from the Son, but rather eternally from the Father and into our Time through the Son. That’s what we should mean when we say in the Creed that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son. Each one is God, yet there are not three gods but One God only.

[PAUSE]

Perhaps you are finding this all very technical and probably exceedingly boring. Why’s that? Perhaps because you stopped understanding what’s being said? Or perhaps you knew this all already? So why bother with it all?

We bother because this complicated God of the Creed is our God. This is how He is and how we begin to form our relationship with Him. Our lack of understanding helps us connect with Him through what we do know. We know that God is our source, the reason why we exist, and by thinking about how He reveals Himself to us, we fall down at His feet worshipping the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, each distinct, each true God.

When our understanding leaves us, this is precisely the moment when we need to stand in the warmth of His light and just enjoy it. This is the Light Divine that warms us completely through, not just our minds, but our bodies and souls as well! We use the loss of our understanding to propel us into that Light Divine where we can truly discover God who exceeds all we can possibly imagine and yet reached out to us in true, pure love, warming our dark, cold lives with the beams of His light.

Let us say our creed and rush headlong past where our heads cry, "stop!" trusting only in His love for us.