O beata Trinitas!

The photo above was taken at the Graben in Vienna and shows the top of a column that stands in the centre of this pedestrianised shopping street. Surmounting this column is a gilt sculpture of the Most Holy Trinity: God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

On this Solemnity, it is often worth contemplating the sheer mystery of the Triune God. I personally like to read the so-called 'Athanasian Creed', the Quecumque vult.

However, I would like to continue the Von Balthasarian reflections which began last Sunday with another extract of his, taken from "Credo: Meditations on the Apostles' Creed":

"God's love is so complete in itself - he is lover, responding beloved, and union of the fruit of both - that he has need of no extradivine world in order to have something to love. If such a world is freely created by God, apart from any compelling need, then this occurs, from the viewpoint of the Father, in order to glorify the beloved Son; from the viewpoint of the loving Son, in order to lay everything as a gift at the Father's feet; and from the viewpoint of the Spirit, in order to lend new expression to the reciprocal love between Father and Son. Hence, the one triune God is Creator of the world..."

As he writes also in "Explorations in Theology III: Creator Spirit":

"You, Father, give your entire being as God to the Son; you are Father only by giving yourself; you, Son, receive everything from the Father and do not wish to be anything else before him than the one who receives and gives back, the one who portrays and glorifies the Father in loving obedience; you, Spirit, are the unity of both these gifts of self that run to meet one another, their 'we' as a new 'I' that rules royally, divinely over both - love become a Person! - and wishes in both for nothing else than to be crowned by the absolute love: to abandon in the gift of self all one's own acts of planning and disposing, in order to let love rule instead of them."

This is the awesome God of love whom we celebrate today in a special way and indeed, in whom "we live and move and have our being" everyday.
To the Blessed and Most Holy Trinity be praise, adoration, glory, thanksgiving and power for ever and ever!