This Sunday, The Trinity Means We are Not the Children of Divorce

The doctrine of the Trinity tells us that God is one and God is three. That changes everything for us.

Here are four takeaways for Trinity Sunday Year A drawn from Sunday Readings columns at this site and the Extraordinary Story podcast.

First: The only way we find rest in God is by entering into his community of love.

The Compendium of the Catechism is remarkable for its brevity. However, in writing about the Trinity, the Compendium indulges in one of its only quotations, when it quotes Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity saying:

“O my God, Trinity whom I adore … grant my soul peace; make it your heaven, your beloved dwelling, and the place of your rest. May I never abandon you there, but may I be there, whole and entire, completely vigilant in my faith, entirely adoring, and wholly given over to your creative action.”

That’s the attitude expressed in the readings for Sunday: Souls find solace in God because he is the Holy Trinity.

Jesus doesn’t just tell us God has mercy on us; he describes the inner life of the Trinity to show us how God’s love for the Son and the Son’s love for the Father are mutually sacrificial. And that gives us hope.

If you’re like me, you sometimes think of him as an angry judge, outraged by human failures and eager to act on his disappointment. But “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him,” says Jesus in Sunday’s Gospel.

Or maybe you think of him as a critic with impossibly high standards, for whom your best is never good enough. No. He wants you to know that he is willing to work with very little — “Whoever believes in him will not be condemned,” he says.

Notice how the Father loves us, and notice how the Father loves his Son. He saw that we were in trouble, so he acted to save us. He saw that his Son’s sacrifice would mean more love, so he sacrificed his Son. Neither of these things happens without a cost; pure love always requires self-gift.

But God is a real Father, not “Fatherhood” in some abstract way. From all eternity God the Father has generated God the Son from his bosom, says the Catechism. The Holy Spirit is the bond of their love.

Second: We need unity in community to be whole.

The best way to see what is stake in the doctrine of the Trinity is to look at the Christian family. The Christian family is an image of the Trinity, as the Catechism (No. 2205) points out — a communion of persons.

But what happens when that communion fails? Amanda Flageolle wrote about being the child of divorce in the Denver Catholic on May 26, 2026. She identifies whats hurts about it: not that love was lacking, but that unity was lacking.

“My parents, who always loved me, who always told me they loved me, divorced when I was 3, less than 4 years after they’d tied the knot,” she says. “I don’t have any memories of them being together, and I spent much of my adolescent life assuming their divorce didn’t affect me because I was so young.”

But it did, she said:

“You see, divorce is so much more than the sundering of a bond between two people who have children together. What was once one household is now two: two addresses, two phone numbers, two different states. What was once financial stability is now under siege as each parent separately tries to support themselves and the child. What once was a home becomes a place the child stays occasionally, or is completely lost.

“The child can no longer be hugged by both parents simultaneously. … She can’t give the drawing from school to both parents to put on the fridge. She has to choose.”

Then, the pain of the “no more two” becomes the pain of “only one” — the pain of loneliness.

“Now she lives with a single parent who can’t give her the same level of attention. The child can’t remain a child; she must learn to care for herself and self-parent. The parents themselves are wounded and sad, and the child bears the weight of emotionally parenting her parents — the opposite of how this beautiful relationship should be.”

Ironically, when there is only one parent, there is not more time for the child, but less; there is not more attention for the child, but less; there is not more given to the child but more taken from the child. That is because when the two parents are separated, their love for their child is separated, also. And when the two parents are together, their love is united and grows.

This is the way to understand how God is a Trinity and not a Binary. The Love between Father and Son is even more fruitful and full than two parents’ love. It becomes a new divine Person.

Third: That makes the Trinity the ultimate Catholic “both/and.”

Theology majors at Benedictine College love pointing out that Catholic faith is not an “either/or” faith but a “both/and” faith. Jesus is both fully God and fully man. We follow both the Scripture and Tradition. The “real us” is our body and our soul. Salvation comes from faith and the works that express faith.

But we are also the religion of both Aristotle and Homer — both the unity of a single noncontingent being and a divine plurality. We see single-mindedness in God and camaraderie in God.

In the First Reading, from the Book of Exodus, Moses finds finds solace in the fact that God is One. It was a relief to the Jewish people to know that there is only one God, not several competing gods. The glory of that one God is overwhelming, and Moses cries out the name of the one God.

In the Second Reading, from Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, new Christians find solace in the fact that God is “Three.” The people live in relation to one another, and so it makes sense that God has “relationships” built within him. Paul describes to the Corinthians how to imitate “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit”: To live Trinitarian unity, “Mend your ways, encourage one another, agree with one another, live in peace, and the God of love and peace will be with you. Greet one another with a holy kiss.”

In the Psalm, we worship God and in worshiping, discover who he is.

• God is not just our individual Lord. In the is “Lord, the God of our fathers.”
• God is not just a quiet, subtle presence. He is “praiseworthy and exalted above all forever.”
• God is not just “everywhere” in some nebulous kind of way. He is “Blessed … in the temple of your holy glory.”

All of this prevents God from being a lonely figure, or a nebulous force — but a loving community whose love pours out and increases, like a family’s.

Fourth: So enter into the life of the Trinity.

We tend to either think of him as too small, or too overwhelming; too undefined, or too nitpicky. We focus on one aspect of him, and the picture gets distorted. On Trinity Sunday the Church urges, “Know all of him.”

God is not a force ready to break us — he is the Father longing to be followed, offering his son for us not just in some abstract way in heaven, but at each Mass where we witness the Father offering his son on the altar.

God is not random divine affirmation — he is the Son who became like us to be trusted and loved, and to enter our very bodies with his body, blood, soul and divinity.

He is three in one: Power, Mercy and Grace; Father, Son and Spirit. He makes us more alive in his life, to make our love more real in his love.

God is not hiding in the past, lost in the present, and hoped for in the future — he is the one who was, and is and will be to come. We are not the lonely children of divorce — we are the children of love, real love, and God wants to gather all of his children together in that love.

Image: Wiki

By Tom Hoopes