Being As Communion
Michiel Peeters - Today, on the Sunday after Pentecost, we celebrate the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity: we celebrate that God is one, but He is not alone. God, the Mystery that creates all things, that participates His being to all things, is not a monolith, but a communion of Persons, a communion of Father, Son, and their mutual love, the Holy Spirit. This Mystery of the “One and Triune God”—which only Christianity reveals—clarifies and explains every human existence.
One cannot understand the human being except in the light of this three-person God; of the fact that Being is not oneness in a mechanical sense. Being is a communion. This, for sure, is mysterious. One could not invent it. However, it can provide us with a clearer understanding of the reality of our own experience. The message that Being, on whom all things depend, in whom all things end, and of whom all things are made, is both the absolute one and communion at the same time, offers a unique explanation of how co-existence works. First of all, the relationship between the “I” and the “you,” between a man and a woman, and between parents and their children. No analysis by reason alone can explain this paradoxical nature of the “one” and the “many,” which is human experience.
A human being never says the word “I” so intensely, never perceives the unity of his own identity with the same passion, as when he says “you” or when, with the same love with which he says “you,” he says “we.” The French scholar Charles Moeller says: “In love, our freedom gives itself totally to the one we love. Only then is man conscious that he is complete. With this ‘dual creation,’ it was God’s wish that man be complete only in a context of dialogue [and abandonment]. In the union of love […] the person is himself or herself at last, in freedom. It is so because God is Trinity: the relationships which are the substance, the very life of God, demonstrate that freedom and self-giving are synonymous. There is a divine family, a heavenly fatherhood of which all earthly fatherhoods are an image and of which they are all part.”
This is why no theoretical effort can offer a better explanation for the peaks and the most characteristic aspects of the human experience, made in God’s image. Moreover, what we have said about love also holds for another of man’s supreme yearnings—knowledge—which is all the more powerfully united, the more the subject and object remain distinct. No philosophy can pinpoint the ultimate mechanism of this paradoxical oneness.
The mystery of Being, revealed to man as the Trinity, explains the profound convergence of the “I” and the “you,” of the “I” and the “we,” and the unity of the individual with the presence of others. Without this explication, the identity of the “I” and the presence of the “other” would both be mere fragments of an absurd existence.
The mystery of the Trinity has a “voice” that enables it to be heard as a clarifying factor within our experience. It belongs, in a profound way, to the ultimate meaning of life; or better still, the ultimate meaning of life belongs to the mystery of the Trinity.
The author has not revised the notes and its translation.
