Pastor's Column 9-10-2023
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September 10, 2023Dear Parishioners,
This weekend we kicked off our new grades 1 to 8 religious education program “Families of Faith.” We start with the basics: a daily routine of prayer as conversation with God. One question that parents often ask me is: “How do I teach my children about the Trinity?”
As I tell the eighth graders, any discussion about God is (in part) necessarily difficult because we are on the fringes of what our minds can understand. We can come to some understanding of who God is using our reason and particularly what he has told us through Revelation, but we can never fully comprehend God. We know that God is a Trinity of persons only through Revelation. We can find hints and markers of the Trinity in the world around us, but to be able to assent to the idea that God is three persons in one God is something only faith can reveal. This does not mean that the Trinity is a contradiction or against reason because we can grasp it to the extent that it does not cause difficulties.
One idea that is important to convey to children (and to ourselves) is that understanding comes with time, study, prayer, and contemplation. For children, start by having them memorize the formula: We believe in One God, who is a Trinity of three distinct Persons who are all God. This is the bedrock from which you can go forward. Next, use an analogy or image. St. Patrick comes to mind. In order to explain the Trinity when he was converting the Irish, he used a three-leaf clover. It is one plant with three leaves and so this helped the Irish to see the meaning of the Trinity. Yet, with any analogy, you need to purify it: negate any concepts in it which would not properly apply to God, while affirming what would. In the case of the clover the three Persons are not simply three parts or powers of God (that would be Modalism). Also, we say that God is a Trinity of persons. One definition of person is: a unique substantial being. This is not the definition of “person” in the Trinity, because to say that each Person of the Trinity is a unique substantial being means that we would have three gods. We need to hold on to the distinctiveness of the persons and this comes from their relation to each other.
Part of teaching children the faith is learning about it ourselves. If anyone would like to read a great text on the Trinity I recommend Giles Emery, O.P., The Trinity: An Introduction to Catholic Doctrine on the Triune God. In fact I recommend reading anything by Emery. There are so many other things to understand in relation to the Trinity: Appropriation, Communication of Idioms, Analogy, Nature, Person, and so on, but I hope that this will get the ball rolling.
In Christ,
Fr. Barrow
