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Promoting Communion In The Human Race – Dcn. Kris Kuckelman

Dcn. Kris Kuckelman’s Homily May 29, 2021

“Today we honor the Holy Trinity- God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit and as humans with intellect by reason we can know that God exists without the help of any divine revelation and thus we say that God’s existence is part of the natural law, but to know about the Trinity we have to have the aid of divine revelation coupled with reason. In the Old Testament there are hints about the Trinity. In the New Testament, some of those revelations about the Trinity are a little more explicit, but because our intellect as humans is limited, there are some aspects of the Trinity that we’re just not capable of understanding at least in this life. We do know that each person of the Trinity is God, is divine and therefore each person is eternal without a beginning and without any end and each person of the Trinity is omnipotent, their power is unlimited. Each person of the Trinity is omniscient, their knowledge is unlimited. In this life we can’t imitate any of these traits of the Trinity, obviously, but the Trinity has a trait that we can imitate and that is the communion that exists among the three persons of the Trinity. This communion within the Trinity is unlimited and it is unconditional. Each person of the Trinity pours themself out, empties themself out for the other persons of the Trinity. Each person of the Trinity conforms their will to the will of the others. As Christians, we’re called to promote communion in the entire human family in a way that imitates or is an icon of the Trinity. In fact, promoting communion in the human race, it goes to the very essence of what it means to be a Christian and we do that by emptying ourself or pouring ourself out to others and we do that by conforming our wills to the needs and the wants of other people and we’re called to promote communion in all of our relationships, in our families, with our neighbors, our co-workers, in our marriages, in all of our relationships with people who are different from us, people who can never repay us for the charitable acts we might provide to them and even people who offend us. This is another teaching of the Church that is countercultural and it’s another teaching of the Church that is simple, but very difficult to implement. When we fail to promote communion in our relationships it’s a good thing to examine why we’ve fallen short and most often the causes are either pride or self-love and the antidote of pride is to practice the opposite virtue humility every chance we get and the antidote for self-love is to mortify ourselves by little by little detaching ourselves from worldly pleasures and worldly comforts. Another thing we can do is we can ask for Mary’s intercession. Of course, Mary is a creature, she is not divine, but she’s a daughter of God the Father, she’s the spouse of the Holy Spirit, and she’s the Mother of Jesus Christ. If any creature would have the ear of the Trinity, I would think she would. We must never get discouraged when we realize that we have failed to promote this communion in our relationships with other people. If this was easy, the Church wouldn’t teach us this over and over and over again, but when we can truly empty ourselves, pour ourselves out for other people, we can get a taste of that happiness that we hope to enjoy someday in Heaven when we are in that full, complete, absolute communion with the Holy Trinity and that’s why each one of us was created.”