Someone asked: “Can we sing Gloria in church?” The long and short answer is: “No.” But, is there something we can learn about the Trinity from the celebrations of the St. Louis Blues these days?
There are some songs that get associated very powerfully with particular events. So much so that to hear them brings us back to the emotions associated with that event. So I suspect most of you will be able to recognize the following song in 3 chords or less. <<plays intro to “Gloria”>> And I suspect that most of you will know exactly where you were when the Blues won the Stanley cup on Wednesday. Whether at a friend’s house, at the watch party at the Enterprise Center, Busch stadium, your local pub, or, like my brother Joe, listening to the broadcast on his phone in the middle of the night in a hotel room in Ireland, it did not matter where you were. You were united, weren’t you, with all those people from around the city and county and even the world, sharing in that common experience. And though we are all so different, and have different lives and backgrounds and experience, when that final buzzer blew, there was this tangible sense of unity, of being in it together that was palpable.
What I suggest about that experience is that you got a tiny taste, just a foreshadowing, just a glimpse of the glory of the Trinity. We call God – Father, Son and Spirit. We acknowledge three distinct persons, yet the reality is that the unity is far greater, far deeper than the diversity of persons in the Trinity. And in those moments, those glorious moments when we are bound together in a common experience, we ‘know’ the Trinity in a way that words will never be able to describe.
St. Paul talks about his experience of the Trinity this way in that second reading:
“we have peace with God through our faith in our Lord Jesus Christ . . . because the love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that He has given to us.” (Romans 5:1,5)
A commentator wrote this about those lines: “Here is what Paul knows, and what his readers (then and now) know – through our faith and commitment to Jesus Christ we experience inner peace… a profound connection and access to God we could not know apart from knowing Christ, and this closeness to God feels like our hearts and souls are filled to the brim with the love and presence of God, which is the witness and warm embrace of the Holy Spirit of God with our spirits.”
These days, in St. Louis, all you have to hear is those three chords, and your heart is transported to a place where it is filled – a pride, a sense of being in this together, a sense of wonder and amazement. And, if we take a moment to let that human experience sink in, it can open for us an experience of the Trinity – of God’s grace and love being poured into OUR hearts. The high fives, the honking, the greeting of perfect strangers, the conversations with random people at the grocery store, the parade – it is all an expression of the longing in the human heart for the Glory that is the relationship of the Trinity. When we sense the unity in those moments, we know something of the heart of the Trinity – a love that is not static, but vibrant and giving and exchanging and surrendering and sacrificing.
This Father’s day weekend, don’t we also know, at its best, another experience of the love at the heart of the Trinity? I think of my own dad, and though far from perfect, I knew in his hands, etched by the battery acid that was a part of his daily work, the sacrificial love of the Father in sending his son, the sacrifice of a Son on the cross for our sins, the sending of the Spirit that this love might be real and practical and alive. I remember the pride dad had in us, his kids. A deep faithfulness as he attended daily mass before going to work. And a never complaining attitude, even when he’d come home dead tired from moving literally tons of batteries on some days. That too, was an experience of the Trinity’s love. If you can, to the extent you know the love of Father, Son and/or Spirit because of your own dad, thank him this weekend.
<<plays intro to “Gloria”>> We will have that song, for better or worse, stuck in our collective memory here in St. Louis for a while. As often as you hear it, let it bring you back, not just to the moment when we won the cup, but to that larger experience of the love of God “poured into our hearts through our faith in our Lord Jesus Christ and the power of the Spirit.” And may we use that experience of unity, that glimpse of the Trinity to create not just the joy of a Stanley Cup celebration, but in our families, parish, city and world – a world that mirrors that love of God – Father, Son and Spirit – poured into our hearts… Gloria? Maybe. Glorious? You betcha!