Another question from one wanting to be confirmed

Here is the teen's question: How can it be that we believe in the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit and still say we believe in one God?

 

And here's my response: How sharp you are to ask this question!

 

The great saint, Augustine, who died in in 430 AD, 

had the same question. One day he was walking along the beach and was thinking on how he could explain the Trinity. Suddenly he saw a boy with a bucket and a shovel.  He was digging a hole in the sand and then running back and forth to the sea, filling up his bucket and running to the hole to fill the hole with the sea water. Augustine stopped and asked the boy: What are you doing? The boy replied: I am going to fill that hole with the whole ocean!

   

Aha! Augustine saw the connection: how impossible it is for the tiny human mind to grasp the awesome mystery of God! Still, we need to try!  Let me put it this way: God gives Himself utterly and completely. That gift of Self is so complete that the Gift is another Person of the Trinity. Then the love between the Father and the Son is so perfect, so self-giving, that this Divine Love is another Person of the Holy Trinity, the Holy Spirit.  

 

It takes lots of prayer and a willingness to enter into the mystery of God to even begin to have a grasp of this mystery. But those great saints who have done so assure us that God is a community: one God and yet a Trinity. And God is self-giving to the max, and so we should be as well.

 

I feel like I’ve only cracked open a door to this mystery. It will take eternity to delve into the mystery more and more.

 

A religious question like this, and other such questions or even doubts that come along in life, are put into our minds by the Lord to help us grow and look more deeply into the mysteries of our faith.  They are called mysteries because we can always learn more, and life is a journey of slowly seeing the truths of our faith with ever greater depth.