Love: Giving Yourself Without Losing Yourself

The Mystery of the Trinity and Today’s Misconceptions of Love

Priests are advised to preach today about the mystery of the Trinity, even if it is difficult to understand, let alone to explain to others. It is easy to fall into the temptation of preaching about “something to do” rather than trying to make sense of this mystery which is the center of Christian and Catholic doctrine. Today I may fall into that temptation… but let me try, at least, to tell you something about this mystery and then, yes, a practical application.

1.  The mystery of the Trinity is the mystery of one God subsisting in three distinct persons. There is only one divinity which is entirely given by the Father to the Son and by both of them to the Holy Spirit. The divinity of the Father and of the Son is one and the same because the Father gives everything He is and He has to his son. Whatever the Father is, the Son is as well, because the Father gives Himself entirely to the Son. The divinity of the Holy Spirit is one and the same with the divinity of the Father and of the Son, because both of them, possessing one divinity, give it to the Holy Spirit. Father, Son and Holy Spirit have only one divinity, but the Son receives it from the Father and the Holy Spirit receives it from both the Father and the Son. This is why theologians say that in the Trinity the persons are distinct because of a distinction of origin. That is, they are not distinct because they are three different things, but because the Son has the Divinity as originated from the Father, and the Holy Spirit has the Divinity as originated from the Father and the Son. The three of them share one divinity only, which the Father gives entirely to the Son, and Father and Son give entirely to the Holy Spirit.

2.  The Father gives the divinity entirely to the Son without losing it. Some theologians do not understand this. They think that God in order to give himself must lose himself, at least in a way. And because God is love and we need to love in the way God loves, for these thinkers, human love is losing oneself for others. It is difficult to see but there is a great misunderstanding and a great danger in that doctrine.

In trinitarian theology, the error is thinking that there can be no procession (no “coming from”) without a certain change. In nature, when something comes from another thing, the thing coming from the other is new, and the thing acting as source or origin changes somehow. Thus, when a flower proceeds from a plant, the flower is new, and the blossoming plant had to develop and change in order to produce the flower. Because God is the origin of all things, bad theologians think that God was something like an undeveloped plant who blossomed in creation, and therefore God passed from being undetermined, undeveloped, to be somehow explicated in creation. For these theologians, God is no more what He was before creation, He “lost” Himself to gain creation, and this is actually good for God, they say, because love is perfect when one is so good that he doesn’t care what he loses for the other…

This is insane, but because it has an appearance of good, we need to make some distinctions. In human love, we sacrifice anything for the beloved, even our bodily life (“deny yourself” and “take up your cross” are related to this), but we do not destroy ourselves out of love. That is, we do not destroy our love. If we did, we would leave our beloved with nothing. When someone truly loves you, that person wants you, not something else that you may leave behind for them. People work very hard sometimes for their loved ones, so that they may have a good life, but a good life is being loved… How much do we need to work, and how much do we need to love people and spend time with them? What do people need the most from us? Can you disappear from someone’s life out of love?

3.  Back to the Trinity. For some people, God was so good that He lost his omnipotence when He became man and then lost even His human life when He died on the Cross. In this way, they say, He gave us a great proof of His love… but He can now do nothing for us, because He is dead. How kind of God! This is ridiculous. They say, however, that we should not aspire to life after death, because this would be aspiring to something created, like pleasure or material things. Instead, we should aspire to “love,” they say, because love is perfection. I respond, yes, love is perfection, but not when it is understood as the destruction of the lover. We do not want our lover to change (let alone to die), but to be ours completely. Love is perfection when the lover gives everything which is his to the beloved without losing it. And this is possible because the lover is not giving just his money or a moment of pleasure, but is giving himself. You lose your money when you give away your money, but you do not lose yourself when you give yourself. The Father gives His whole being to the Son, and Father, Son and Holy Spirit will give their entire being to us in Heaven. Thus, our desire of life after death is a desire of possessing God himself, it is our looking forward to that day in which God will belong to us forever, in all its beauty.

You do not lose yourself when you give yourself entirely. This is what happens in the Trinity. This is why God does not change, and did not change when He became man. The Son gave Himself entirely to His human nature, and this is why we say that the man Jesus is true God.

God loves because He is perfect, whereas we become perfect when we love. This is why love in God does not require change, whereas we change when we love. In love, we must lose things in order to gain ourselves, we must purify ourselves in order to become true lovers, but once that is done, we gain something that we must not lose and that we can give to those we love: we gain ourselves, we gain our freedom. Giving that freedom to God is the secret of life.