Holy Trinity Sunday Year A – May 2026

'God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.' — John 3:16

A young woman, named Anna, spent forty years caring quietly for her elderly neighbours: cooking meals, sitting through long nights of illness, pressing small notes of encouragement through letterboxes. She never sought recognition. She simply loved. She died largely unnoticed by the wider world. Yet at her funeral, the church was full — faces she had never expected, lives she had touched without ever knowing it. Love, it seems, has a way of spreading far beyond what those who give it can ever see.

Emmanuel d'Alzon, founder of the Assumptionists, understood something of this hidden grace. For d'Alzon, everything began and ended in the Trinity. 'The glory of God,' he wrote, 'is the one goal of all our works.' Father, Son, and Spirit — a communion of infinite, self-giving love — pour themselves outward into creation not because they must, but because love, by its very nature, overflows. The Trinity is not a distant doctrine. It is the living heartbeat of all that exists.

Augustine, wrestling with the same mystery centuries before, marvelled: 'You made us for yourself, and our heart is restless, until it rests in you.' We are not accidents of an indifferent universe. We are intended, shaped with meaning, and brought forth by design. We are desired and loved into being by a God who cannot help but love.

And the deep, deep wonder that should stop us in our tracks is that the Trinity gazes upon humanity — with all its wars and wounds, its cruelties and betrayals — and still sees what we so rarely see in one another. It sees Anna's forty years of faithful, unwitnessed love. It sees the teacher who stays late without praise, the parent who prays silently in the dark, the friend who shows up again and again when no one else will. The vast, hidden ocean of goodness quietly flowing through human hearts — 'the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit' (2 Cor 13:14) — is never lost on the One who breathed it into being in the first place.

D'Alzon believed the Trinity does not call us to passive admiration but to bold participation. 'We must work,' he urged, 'for the coming of the Kingdom.' The Father sends. The Son redeems. The Spirit sustains and renews. And we — fragile, failing, yet deeply loved — are invited into that same eternal movement of self-giving love.

Go then, like Anna. Love without counting the cost. Give without waiting to be seen. Trust that what remains hidden from human eyes is held perfectly, tenderly, and forever in the gaze of the God who is, in himself, an eternal and inexhaustible communion of love.

Thanks be to God!! Alleluia! Alleluia!!

By Fr. Thomas O'Brien a.a.