Fizzing with love

A few months ago I came across a quote from a conference by Manuela Vicente, a former Superior General: Community is the love of a group in order to love better. True community is about a double movement of love: the mutual selfless, generous, supportive love of its members for each other in order to be able to share that love with the wider community, individually and collectively. A community which is not impelled beyond itself - whether in prayer, friendship or activity - is no more a community than one in which the members do not love and support each other.

The Trinity, whose feast we celebrate today, is definitely our model of community par excellence! It is a community whose very name and essence is love - abundant, powerful, mutual. I remember someone once describing the Trinity as "fizzing" with love, and that's a lovely image for a love relationship which is alive and active. But that love relationship only really fizzes because it transcends itself, going beyond itself into loving all creation with a love as powerful and abundant as that which binds it to itself.

Thinking of the Trinity as Love, and loving, makes me think of Julian of Norwich, whose revelations are full to bursting with the idea of God as love and lover, as one who delights in his people, and wants only their good. In one revelation she talks specifically about the Trinity, and her initial words describe something which is definitely fizzing:

In the three words, 'joy, happiness and eternal delight,' I was shown three heavens. By 'joy' I understood the pleasure of the Father; by 'happiness' the praise of the Son; by 'eternal delight' the Holy Spirit. The Father is pleased, the Son is praised, the Spirit is delighted.

Three heavens in one, full of joy and delight - and fizzing with love! Just the sort of thing we need to lift our spirits on a dull day in mid-June, with rain forecast for the coming week!