Trinity Sunday is the birthday of the Institute of the Holy Family of Bordeaux!
In 1393, speaking about her visions about the Trinity, Julian Norwich wrote, “God showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, 'What may this be?' and my question was answered, 'It is everything that has been made.' I marveled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it. And so have all things their beginning by the love of God. In this little thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it. The second that God loves it. And the third, that God keeps it. But what is this to me? Truly, the Creator, the Keeper, the Lover…”
Julian’s vision does not replace the common three names of God; Father, Son, and Spirit. But she uses three new names to probe their mystery. If God is a maker, then all that exists God wanted it to be. If God is a lover, then God gives God’s very self to save creation. If God is keeper, God protects all that is, never abandoning what has been made.
The same was our experience as Holy Family Sisters at our beginnings:
It was Trinity Sunday, 28th May 1820. Three young women under the guidance of Pierre Bienvenu Noailles, the Founder, “experienced a special grace…. they desired, sought only God Alone, His love, His will. The heroism of these three women, completely unaware of their future, their destiny; and the simplicity of their faith in uncertainty led them to plant in the field of the Church, the tree of the Holy Family which would one day, bear numerous branches.”
(A Good Man has passed this way, pg. 54)
The Feast of the Trinity is the feast of God's love when we celebrate God as One, as Relationship, as Communion, self-revealing and involved in our history. This God of ours desires to be known by us so that we come to share the fullness of Life and Love offered to us.
May our celebrations today, urge us to welcome the beauty and richness of our diversity leading us to be ONE in God and with one another! May the Prayer of Jesus – “May they be one” – come true in us and through us in our world thirsting for Unity, Peace and Justice!