This weekend, we celebrate the Feast of the Blessed Trinity; Father, Son and Holy Spirit: “The Glory of God is a human being fully alive”. (St. Irenaeus). This is our deepest vocation; to be a good human being and to be a good Christian. We cannot be one without the other. Our deepest calling is to become the people God intended us to be.

During our life on earth, we are and always will be, incomplete, imperfect. That is why we say, ‘To err is human’. None of us is fully kind, fully patient, or fully moral or virtuous. We cannot live up fully to our laws or to our ideals. That is why we resent the demand that we be faultless; to be faultless is to be a bit inhuman!

Therefore, a good-humoured acceptance of human imperfection is essential if we are to be happy. We accept our limited selves and at the same time we work to develop our talents. We are a mixture of good and bad, strong and weak, faithful and unfaithful, angel and devil.

Our task in life is to overcome our faults and to develop our God-like qualities. So, we try to be unselfish, loving, loyal, compassionate, just, truthful, chaste and so on. We try to overcome fear, guilt, shame, anxiety, lying, dishonesty and the thousand vices that are part of life. We reverence good and moral people because of the help and example they give us. We reverence the three persons of the Blessed Trinity: Father, Son and Spirit who come to help us in our weakness.

On this Trinity weekend, we celebrate the love which the Father, Son and Spirit have for each one is us. It is this love that helps us to feel loved and to be able love others. It is love that makes us fully human, the people God means us to be. That is our happiness. In difficult times, when we feel that no one loves us, we can ask God for help, and even the worst day will not be as bad as we expected. God guides us each day and helps us to become more fully human.

From the Ennis Parish Newsletter, (Adapted)