Some people, when they are writing, need absolute silence: the great novelist Marcel Proust wrote in a cork-lined room, and good luck to him. Others like to have music running in the background. Occasionally I am like that, and what I usually have going, God help me, is that golden oldie, Don McLean singing American Pie.
And there is in that, as you may recall, a moment when the wistful singer says that ‘the three men I admire most/ the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost/ they caught the last train for the coast/ the day the music died’.
This is not high theology, but it is certainly relevant to today’s feast. The revelation that the one God is three-fold in power, three-fold in love, is not something given to humanity just so that we could note it as fact–an exceedingly remote fact like the greatest and most distant of all those billions of stars the science-writers tell us about.
We are shown it, we are told it, in the sort of context provided by our passage from St John’s Gospel today (John 3:16-18), where our Lord says, outright, ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him may not die but may have eternal life. God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but so that the world might be saved through him’.
This means that the loved world is like a loved child–far from flawless, but embraced, nourished, taught, led and healed. It means that however bad things do get here, however violent or malevolent or cynical or steeped in selfishness individuals or societies may become, it is not open to God to give up on the world: the unbreakable cables of his love holds him to us. It means that, do what we may with ruinous weapons in our hands or with the ruinous weapons in our hearts, when the smoke clears and while the stench rises, God will still be there, the One who cannot get away.
If we are honest, we must say that it does not always look like this: often, it does not look like this at all. We do not have to sup together on the grossest of horrors, the mindless or calculated butcheries north and south and east and west in the world. Many of us, instead, can think of personal lesions, which have left parts of us scarified for the rest of our lives: personal desertions or betrayals, riptides in our health, dead-ends to our prospects which have come up in the night, as the Berlin Wall was built overnight to stifle the elementary human freedoms of half a people. Don McLean’s plaint that the divine custodians of love have moved out on us, have left us for dead, sounds pretty much like the last word.
Of course, if we did, through and through, believe that it was the last word, none of us would ever be gathered to celebrate the Eucharist: we would be elsewhere, either having as good a time as possible, or making the best of a bad job, which sounds like much the same sort of thing.
We gather, I hope, not because somebody has bullied us into thinking that if we did not things would get even worse, but because the steady, modest, tender voices of Father, Son and Holy Ghost have gone on being heard in our hearts, to say that they do indeed love us, come what may, and that we would do well to stand and sit and kneel in company with others who have heard the voicing of that love. We gather because the divine ones are here: and they, astoundingly, are here because we are here.
That may be common ground among us, and I hope that it is. But when we begin any Eucharist, any Mass, and invoke the Blessed Three, we also embark once more on the old Christian journey, in which we attempt, in spite of our memories and our fears, to re-learn to love the world.
The levels, the pitches, at which this can be done are countless. You may do nothing more important in your whole life than to give a cup of water to some thirsty unknown passer-by: the Samaritan woman at an old well did that, and everything changed for her, and for many others. You may battle, in the midst of angers and disappointments, to name a good way for human beings to go in life’s forest: Dante did that in his epic poem of ultimate happiness, though he wrote it all in exile, and if he had gone back to his native city he would have been burned alive.
You may take the intricate trails of ordinary human endeavour, things which often look like mazes, with the time, as it does for all of us after a while, running out at a rate we wouldn’t have believed possible: if you do, that aligns you with every saint, named or anonymous, who has ever lived.
In any of these circumstances, the summons comes, many times, not to deny love: not to decline to accept it, not to decline to give it. There is no great skill involved in all this. Giving or receiving love is not like doing astrophysics, or besting Yehudi Menuhin with a violin, or making some competitor at the Olympic Games look silly: a cup of cold water can do it, provided the man and the woman can step beyond ancient hatreds, ancient fears.
The great, but fierce, Christian thinker Blaise Pascal wrote in his notebook that ‘the self can always be hated’. We can do it to ourselves, we can do it to other selves, and we can certainly do it to God; personally, I think that it is mainly to God that we do it–God is the one where all the grudges come home in the end. What today’s feast of the Blessed Three says to us is that this is all a blunder, a mistake about how things truly are.
If we do insist on declining love, in the end nobody, not even God, can stop us: you can ram a lot of things down somebody’s throat, but you can’t ram love down. But to decline love remains a mistake, first, last, and always. As we eat Love’s meal together in the Eucharist, let us pray for one another that we may continue to come to our senses. After all, there is so much to receive, and there is so much to give.
