Feast of Holy Trinity
Homily for 11 June 2006
Rev. Jim Ryan

If I took a survey and asked you to put in order of importance three phrases what, I wonder, would be your order of 1,2, &3. Here they are:

Be Good, Pray Well, Believe what you are told.

Based on my own life experiences and conversations over the years with others I would at least venture a guess that being good and praying well would most often come out ahead of believe what you are told.

Today we celebrate one of those Feasts of doctrine – not a person or an event, but something we have been told. When I was I seminary and being taught all about the Monophysites and the Manicheans and all other stripes of doctrinal factions it all seemed pretty confusing. I benefited from professors who assured us that the resulting definitions of what the church believed were all about trying to cast a wide net and a very broad cloth. Early Church Councils were all about trying to include as many people as they could.

So, when attempting the deepest meanings of Holy Trinity and the nature of God it is helpful to know that the doctrine was more about breadth than depth.

Believing in doctrines is at the service of being good and praying well, I submit today. So let’s look at praying well and being in tune or in touch with God and the life of God. Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk who was on this quest a lot more directly than I ever have been. His quest took him in 1968 to Thailand and contact with Buddhists. At his visit to one of the most sacred Buddhist sites he experienced a clarity and an illumination into all he had been searching for. He wrote after the experience in his journal, “I had a sense of beauty and spiritual validity running together in one aesthetic illumination. I know and have seen what I was obviously looking for.” And one of the greatest gifts in divine contemplation, as every good monk knows, is the clarity of illumination.

Four days after this experience Merton was dead, dying by a tragic accident while still in Thailand. After his almost 30 years of life in the monastery in Kentucky, after all his attempts to pray well, his clarity came half a world away in a Buddhist shrine.

Pray well, be good and allow the doctrine of Holy Trinity, the depths of God, serve your everyday life.