Living Like the Trinity
one
Distinct Persons, with no division
The Trinity tells us that the nature of the Trinity is to exist as distinct Persons sharing all that they have, each with the others. There is no division, no reservation. No Person has a private reserve of goodness that the other Persons can’t access.
They are so united that they are one God, not three gods. They are just one God because even what they are, everything they are, is held in common among them.
They continuously, eternally, give and receive and celebrate the infinite goodness of being God.
This is what makes it so incredible to be God, that it is, a community of distinct Persons in perfect unity with no division or competition
This is what it means to have perfect happiness and this is the perfect happiness that God has invited us to share with Him in Heaven. But it’s also the happiness we’re supposed to approximate as much as possible in this life.
In other words, the Trinity isn’t just the final goal of the Christian life, the Trinity is also the standard for how to live now.
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Each Person experiences the Other’s good as his own
Human experience so often frames the other person’s good as in competition with our own. If someone else gets a job, or a promotion, or an award, or the top score in a class then it means I don’t. But in the Trinity, because it’s the same infinite good, the same divine nature that each of the Persons share, then that division can’t arise. The Father can’t see the Son’s good as in competition with His own because the Son’s good and His good is exactly the same good. So there can’t be any division, or competition because One Person’s good is the same good as the Other Person’s.
That’s why God is love by His very nature, because love is when you regard the good of another as your own.
That’s not automatic for us because we are separate individuals (even though we’re all humans, we’re not all one human being), we sometimes see the other’s good as separate from our good. But we can love our neighbors like the Trinity if we make an act of the will to treat the other’s good as our good.
That’s precisely the moral instruction the Second Person of the Trinity gave us when He came to earth.
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Loving your neighbor as yourself
When Jesus was asked for the greatest commandment, He responded that we must love God absolutely and completely, but that we must also “love our neighbor as ourselves”.
What does that mean? It means that we choose to live like the Trinity. We treat our neighbor’s good as though it were our own good; we work for our neighbor’s happiness as though it were our own happiness.
That means when something good happens to someone else, we rejoice as though it happened to us. When something bad happens to someone else, we are sad as though it happened to us.
That’s incredibly difficult. It means we have to overcome any temptation to envy, to resentment, to acting as though we are more important than anyone else.
That’s incredibly difficult. In fact, it’s impossible on our own.
It’s a divine way of loving, not a human way.
But it’s the only way we can be happy, even as human beings. The only way we can be happy as humans is to love like God.
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The happiest moments of your life
Probably the happiest moment of your life was when you took pleasure in someone else’s pleasure or, put differently, when you shared with someone else in the celebration of a common good.
Do you remember when your first kid smiled for the first time? Do you remember the pure, piercing, almost painful joy that gave you? Do you remember the last time you made a really good friend laugh, and the two of you laughed till it was hard to breathe? Do you remember the last time your spouse said to you, “You make me so happy”?
Those are the best moments human life has to offer. Those times are as good as it gets because we were made to love like God. We were meant to rejoice in the good of others, to unite their happiness with ours in a celebration of the same goodness.
Loving your neighbor as yourself isn’t a punishment, or a discipline, or a chore. It’s the secret to happiness. It’s the happiness we’ll experience forever with the God who is Happiness because He is Trinity.
He is love. He is delighting in the good of the Other. He is delighting in sharing the same good as the Other. He is infinite Joy – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And we try to live that joy now, as best we can, so we can live it forever.
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Heaven as experiencing those moments for eternity
Picture the happiest you ever felt with another human being, a spouse, a child, a friend. Remember the laughter, or the embrace. Remember what it felt like when your kid did well at a sports event, and you cheered. Or what it felt like when you saw your wife and thought “I don’t deserve this, I don’t deserve to be this lucky.” Or when your friend got through a difficult time, and you felt so relieved, so grateful.
In each of those cases, the goodness of the other, the goodness that happened to the other, was celebrated as your goodness and you were thrilled with happiness. Heaven is that forever. God is that infinitely.
Holy Trinity, come inside us and give us your joy and your love. Help us to love the people in our lives as we love ourselves. Help us do that always, not just occasionally. Bring us to you, so that we can love as you love, and celebrate as you celebrate, for all eternity.