Tag Archives: Holy Spirit

Guest Post: On Trinitarian Symbolism in the Family

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By Connor Szurgot

When speaking of the Blessed Trinity, the Catechism of the Catholic Church states, “the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is the central mystery of Christian faith and life. It is the mystery of God in himself.” (CCC 234) Beyond even that epic and truly awe-some reality is the reality that, since every cause is in some way in its effect, all of created reality is in some way Trinitarian. One of the clearest examples of this Trinitarian symbolism in created reality is the family. As such, the devil seeks to attack the Blessed Trinity through His image: the family.

A Community of Persons, United by Love

Through the mystery of the Trinity is not able to be fully comprehended by man, certain facts about the mystery can be understood. Some of those facts are: 1) There is one Divine nature, 2) there are three distinct Divine Persons in the Godhead, 3) each of these Divine Persons is co-equal, co-eternal, and fully God, 4) each of the Divine Persons is only differentiated from the others by their relations to the other Persons. These relations are as follows: 1) the Father, the first Person of the Trinity, eternally begets the Son, the second Person of the Trinity and 2) the Holy Spirit, the third Person of the Trinity, eternally proceeds from the Father and the Son. Without delving too deep into this mystery, it is important to understand that all three Persons are united in love. The Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father and this eternal perfect love between the Father and the Son is the Holy Spirit.

With that understanding established, it is not hard to see how the family images this. A man and women love each other so much as to give themselves to each other in the life-long bond of matrimony and the fruit of their married love is a child. What unites them in the child on a material level are their shared genes. (Indeed, the father and the mother are in a way now more completely united since the child is the product of both of them.) Yet, beyond the material level, the are united in mutual love, one for another. Also, each member is distinct in their role within the family. They are a community of persons, united in love, that images the community of Persons, united in eternal love.

The First Attack: Gender Theory

Progressive gender theory advances the idea that men and women are the same. This positions leads to two conclusions: 1) to be a ‘man’ or a ‘woman’ has no actual meaning and 2) that one can switch between being a man or a woman at will because what you are is defined only by what you think you are. In addition to the obvious absurdity of this claim, a problem with this is shown by a passage from Genesis, “So God made man in his own image, made him in the image of God. Man and woman both, he created them.” (Gen. 1:27) Notice two things: 1) that God clearly created two distinct sexes and 2) that He created them in the image of God. Clearly, the complementarity of man and woman are supposed to reveal, in a subtle way, something about the Trinity.

The complementary of man and woman is supposed to model the relationship of the Father and the Son. The Father (the man) eternally loves and gives Himself to the Son (the woman) Who receives Him and gives Himself back in return. The man is the giver in the relationship while the woman receives him and gives herself back in return. The natural inclinations in man and woman show this to be true and to attempt to defy this is not only to make oneself miserable, but to destroy this image of the Trinity in man.

The Second Attack: Divorce

Divorce is the first of these three attacks that has found its way into mainstream acceptance among Protestant Christian circles. This is strange since Christ is very clear that, “[husband and wife] are not two, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.” (Matt. 19:6) This practice attacks the Trinity by destroying the Love that binds the Father and the Son together, the Holy Spirit. When a man and woman give themselves to each other in marriage, something new is created even before they step away from the altar. The objective reality of their marriage comes into being and exists in a way that is separate, but dependent on the two people in the marriage. This dependency is not upon the will of the two people joined, but upon their lives. Their marriage will objectively exist until death do they part.

When a couple divorces, they tear apart and divide what God has created to be the symbol of His Unity in the Trinity: the family. The painful effects of such a rupture are often far reaching. It can be particularly damaging to the children of their marriage, who have lost what was supposed to be their image of complete and unconditional love—their image of God on earth.

The Third Attack: Contraception

The second attack of the three that has broken through the walls of the broader Christian kingdom and proceeded to pillage and destroy the interior of that kingdom is contraception. At the beginning of Creation, God gave all animals the blessing of the ability to produce another being like itself. Only in man, however, can we call this blessing procreation instead of reproduction. Only man has been given the privilege of assisting God in the creation of new souls. It is a privilege so important and sacred that it has always been entrusted to two people and marked with a degree of pleasure befitting the goodness of such an act. Moreover, it is a power which makes man truly God-like in the love which motivates it. To will to bring into existence a creature that you will care for and sacrifice for and who has done nothing for you, is indeed incapable of doing anything for you at the beginning, is an act imaging the love that drove God in the act of creation.

The act of contraception, however, opposes the image of the Trinity by removing from a man and woman the natural end of their love and the damage caused by this removal is proportional to the good it damages. While a single contraceptive act, even between a man and wife, is gravely sinful as it opposes the end set forth by the natural law, the effects of a contraceptive mindset are even more terrifying. Through the adoption of a contraceptive mindset, our culture has separated marital love and the creation of children into two separate camps. The fruits of such a separation are bountiful in our culture: pre- and extra-martial relations, masturbation, pornography, abortion, fatherless children, the acceptance of homosexuality and numerous other sexual disorders. It paves the way for marital love, which is supposed to express perfect self-giving to another, to corrupt into selfishness and mutual use. The Trinity shows that love is fruitful by its very nature. The love between the Father and the Son spirates out from them and is another Person. To act contrary to the natural end of love is to act contrary to love itself.

The family is the building block of society and God has will that it be the building block of the supernatural society of the Church as well. He has also made it the natural image for His very Nature, the greatest mystery of the Catholic faith. We must defend this great gift from God which has been entrusted to us by living and proclaiming the truth.

A Healthy Sense of Sin?

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In a 1946 Radio Address, Pope Pius XII said that “perhaps the greatest sin in the world today is that men have begun to lose the sense of sin.”  There has been no great moral awakening since he uttered those words so that what was begun has found its completion in our age.  The widespread loss of a sense of sin has led to a great spiritual malaise in which any semblance of shame has been lost and sins are demanded as rights.  The soul of our culture is dead, which is not surprising because its natural soul, the members of the Church, have also lost their sense of sin.  Communion lines grow longer while Confession lines grow shorter and even public sinners are given Communion as a right. 

A Great Spiritual Awakening

Pope St. John Paul II thought that the only way to stimulate a Great Awakening was to restore this sense of sin:

“The restoration of a proper sense of sin is the first way of facing the grave spiritual crisis looming over man today. But the sense of sin can only be restored through a clear reminder of the unchangeable principles of reason and faith which the moral teaching of the church has always upheld.  There are good grounds for hoping that a healthy sense of sin will once again flourish, especially in the Christian world and in the Church. This will be aided by sound catechetics, illuminated by the biblical theology of the covenant, by an attentive listening and trustful openness to the magisterium of the church, which; never ceases to enlighten consciences, and by an ever more careful practice of the Sacrament of Penance.”  

Reconciliation and Penance, 18

The Holy Father was reminding the Church that one of her essential tasks in to preach the bad news of sin.  In fact, the Church has no mission if there is no sin, or at least if there is no sin to be forgiven. Just as the Father sent the Son into the world for the forgiveness of sins, so the Son sends the Apostles and their successors (c.f. John 20:21-23).  To omit the reality of sin from the Gospel renders the Good News utterly senseless. 

The Pontiff did not just say that a sense of sin was necessary, but a healthy sense of sin.  Sin and guilt, at least according to spirit of the world, are things to be explained away because it is unhealthy.  That we can develop a healthy sense of sin is itself Good News because it frees us from not only rationalization but also scrupulosity.  Both of these ensnare us because they leave us closed to the reality of God’s mercy.  What then would a healthy sense of sin consist in?

Elements of a Healthy Sense of Sin

We must first see sin for what it really is.  First and foremost it is an offense against God, but not God as Divine Rulemaker, but God as Father.  In fact, JPII says that all sin is ultimately a rejection of God’s fatherhood.  God gave to us the gift of freedom, but not so that we choose whatever we want, but so that we can choose Him.  He is at every moment providing (e.g. Providence) the means for us to do that.  We only need to orient our freedom towards this reality.  Sin then is disorientation, setting our eyes off in the wrong direction and away from God.  And this is why one of St. Thomas’ thought that “God is offended by us only because we act contrary to our own good” (SCG, 3.122).

A healthy sense of sin then begins by orienting our freedom with acts that are truly good.  When we see sin as ultimately harmful to us and enslaving us, we lose the desire to rationalize and self-forgive.  Now we desire to flush our sin and move forward in freedom.

But it also consists in seeing sin through the lens of God’s Providence.  God only permits our sin if He can turn it to our good.  The obvious example is the “happy fault’ of Adam that won for us the Redeemer.  But this principle applies to each and every sin that we commit.  Ultimately, we are permitted to commit certain sins and not others because those certain sins ultimately can be oriented by God towards our sanctification.

This sense of sin is unfathomable unless we drop the God strictly as Rulemaker paradigm.  He is not sitting in Heaven with His Divine Gotcha Button waiting for us to mess up.  From all eternity He plotted how He was to redeem me and you and that would include using those sins we commit as a means to that sanctification.  This is not to trivialize our sin, but to see them from God’s perspective.  We are permitted to commit certain actual sins because those are the sins that, when repented of, will draw down upon us the grace of a true and deeper conversion.  So that when we sin, the grace of repentance follows right behind it, causing us to run back harder and faster than when we fell.  This healthy sense of sin then takes the focus off of our actions and shines it upon Divine Mercy.  In other words, a healthy sense of sin sees all personal sin as a means that Providence uses to glorify God’s Mercy and save our souls.  Only a healthy sense of sin rooted in this reality protects us from falling into scrupulosity.    

The Power of Pentecost

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Within the Jewish Liturgical Year, there were seven major feasts, three of which were considered “major feasts” and were commanded as times when the males were to “appear before the Lord God” in Jerusalem (c.f. Exodus 23:14-17).  These three major feasts were the feast of Unleavened Bread, the feast of the Ingathering at the end of the year, and the harvest festival.  The Harvest festival, or the Feast of Weeks was to occur on the fiftieth day after Passover (there was some disagreement among the Pharisees and Sadducees as to when the actual feast was to be celebrated).  In later antiquity, it would come to be as Pentecost (Greek for “fiftieth”) by the Greek-speaking Jews.  It was for the celebration of this feast that many Jews from throughout the world (Parthians, Medes, Mesopotamian, Egyptians, etc. as listed in Acts 2:9-10) had gathered when the Holy Spirit was finally manifest on that day.

This helps to explain why so many were gathered on that day in Jerusalem to witness the power from on high, but it does not necessarily explain why it had to be that feast day.  In other words, why was it that the Jewish Feast of Weeks found its fulfillment on Pentecost?

A word first about the concept of “fulfillment.”  When we hear this term used, there is a tendency to think “it had to happen that day in order to fulfill the meaning of Pentecost.”  In short, we can think that the purpose of Pentecost was to fulfill the Feast of Weeks.  Thinking in these terms there is a danger of thinking that the Feast of Weeks is obsolete and now only Pentecost matters.  Properly understood though we should attempt to see things the other way around.  The purpose of the Feast of Weeks was to make Pentecost understandable.  It may no longer be efficacious, but it is not devoid of meaning.  God was so demanding in the rubrics surrounding the Jewish liturgy because He wanted them to act as clear signs of the thing they were pointing to.  The Jews gathered in Jerusalem on Pentecost would have recognized what was happening and were instantly moved upon hearing Peter’s explanation.  But Pentecost was not just for them.  By deepening our own understanding of the Feast of Weeks, we can enter more fully into the celebration and join those first Christians in being “cut to the heart.”

This challenge of deepening our understanding of the Jewish celebrations is echoed in the Catechism:

A better knowledge of the Jewish people’s faith and religious life as professed and lived even now can help our better understanding of certain aspects of Christian liturgy…The relationship between Jewish liturgy and Christian liturgy, but also their differences in content, are particularly evident in the great feasts of the liturgical year, such as Passover. Christians and Jews both celebrate the Passover. For Jews, it is the Passover of history, tending toward the future; for Christians, it is the Passover fulfilled in the death and Resurrection of Christ, though always in expectation of its definitive consummation. (CCC 1096, emphasis added)

In ancient Israel, the Feast of Weeks was a harvest festival in which loaves of bread were offered to the Lord as a gift of the first fruits (a minor Jewish festival celebrated just after the Feast of Unleavened Bread).  It was accompanied by sacred rest and sacrifices (see Num 28:26-31).  It was by the death of the grains of wheat, the first fruits of the wheat that the bread was to be baked.   This grain then takes on the value of a sign of the One Whom “God raised up” (Acts 2:32).  As the definitive sacrifice, He ascended to heaven where God received Him and showed His approval by pouring out His Spirit by a strongly felt sign (Acts 2:33).  Rising on the day after Passover, that is the feast of first fruits, Christ is “the first fruits of those who have died” (1Cor 15:20).

The Feast of Weeks

By this powerful sign, the Apostles now become the harvesters.  And on this day, the harvest is great, drawing 3000 souls to the Lord.  This number is far from arbitrary and it would immediately bring to mind the other aspect of the Feast of Weeks, namely that it was to be marked as a time to remember the giving of the Law on Mt. Sinai.

While God was giving the Law to Moses, the Israelites fashioned the Golden Calf.  In response, the Levites were commanded “’Each of you put your sword on your hip! Go back and forth through the camp, from gate to gate, and kill your brothers, your friends, your neighbors!’ The Levites did as Moses had commanded, and that day about three thousand of the people fell” (Ex 32:27-28).  Spiritually inebriated, the Apostles, that is the priestly successors to the Levites, will put to death the flesh of those 3000 souls, each of which will follow the law because it is written not in stone, but on their hearts (Jer 31:33).

The giving of the Law was the initiation of the Old Covenant.  This indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of the Faithful that will become the sign of the new Covenant, that is Baptism.  Those who are claimed for Christ, the 3000, do as Peter told them— “repent and be baptized” so that they “will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:38).

The giving of the Law as part of the Old Covenant also formed Israel as the People of God—that is the visible Kingdom of God on earth.  At Pentecost, the Church becomes the Kingdom of God that is open to all people.  This understanding helps bring clarity to the somewhat random question and ambiguous response Our Lord gives to the Apostles when, just prior to His Ascension, they ask “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” to which He replies that they will “receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you” (Acts 1:6,8).

The Spirit of Pentecost

All of this remains mere proof-texting unless we allow the effects of Pentecost to be felt in our day.  So many within the Church speak of waiting for a “New Pentecost” in which the power of the Holy Spirit will be made manifest once again.  But there will be no “New Pentecost” because Pentecost was not a single event, but one that was to last perpetually.  The Jews celebrated the different festivals not merely to remind them of the past, but to make the past somehow present to them so that they could participate in it.  The Feast of Weeks was a time for recalling and renewing the Old Covenant and Pentecost ought to be a time that we consciously renew our participation in the New Covenant.

The first way that this should be done is through a renewed focus on our baptismal commitment to offer spiritual sacrifices unceasingly to Christ.  Likewise, we should renew our commitment to the graces of Confirmation, that is when we received the fullness of the Holy Spirit, and march to the Front in the battle to win souls.  Offering Mass for the grace to live those two Pentecostal Sacraments to their fullest would be a worthy intention.

Pentecost is often referred to as the birthday of the Church.  With this in mind, a second way to live Pentecost is to do what we all do at all birthday celebrations—show gratitude for the gift of the person and offer a gift to pay our debt of gratitude.  We can often take for granted the gift of the Church and how much easier it makes our lives.  Yes, we have to deal with the human elements, that is the weeds among the wheat, but the guidance that her teaching office gives us can save us from making a lot of mistakes.  She speaks to nearly every aspect of our lives and offers us a sure port amidst the storms of life.  Amidst a culture in which we are “tossed to and fro by every wave of false doctrine,” there is great comfort knowing we have a place to go for the Truth.  By renewing our efforts to form ourselves in her teachings, to be docile to the truth and proclaim it loudly, we can pay the debt of our gratitude.  We are the new harvesters in the long line of harvesters known as the Communion of Saints.  Pray then, this Pentecost, that the Master of the Harvest will send more out into the fields, priests, and laity alike.