Tales From Trinity Sunday

I want to share a little story about what happened to me yesterday on Trinity Sunday.  I’m sure it’s the most loathed day in the Christian liturgical calendar for Muslims.  After all, the Trinity is probably the top thing that they object to among Christian doctrine.  The other is the preservation of the Quran vs. the supposed non-preservation of the Bible.

August 5, 2012 was a very interesting day for me.  It was the first day that I attended the Traditional Latin Mass.  Less than a month after that I moved to a city three hours away.  I never saw that priest again.  When I moved to my new city I started attending the local TLM on a regular basis.

Yesterday, the homily was amazing.  The priest preached on the creeds of the church and how the Trinity has been viewed throughout the ages.  He put a lot of emphasis on the Athanasian Creed.  He also talked about the simplicity of God and how he didn’t have parts; a belief that became really popular in the medieval era among scholastic theologians.  It wasn’t the normal priest.  Our priest was out of town so it was one that I’d never seen before.  After mass, we had coffee as usual.  After a while, the priest was about to leave to I walked over to him and we struck up a conversation.  We talked about the homily.  We then discussed a range of topics such as grace and the myriad of views regarding whether its created or not.  We even talked about Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange and his views on grace.  Regarding the Athanasian Creed, he grabbed his Breviary and showed me the office for today.

At this point the topic moved on to Neo-Scholasticism over and against the Resourcement school.  He chuckled a bit when I told him that I shamefully used to be in that camp.  At this point the discussion moved to liturgy.  We discussed the liturgy in the early church and eventually talked about the liturgy in the Roman Rite before 1955 since Holy Week was radically changed in that year by Archbishop Annibale Bugnini.

This evolved into the a discussion about my first ever experience at the Latin Mass.  I gave him the story about which city I was in and that it was in the summer of 2012.  I told him that I don’t remember who the priest was and that I was so nervous about receiving communion on the tongue that I didn’t even go for communion.

The priest then told me that he was the TLM priest stationed in that city in the summer of 2012.  I couldn’t believe that all of these years later I finally met the priest that gave me my first exposure to the TLM.  On top of all that, he gave a great historical, and exegetical explanation of the doctrine of the Trinity.  I especially treasure this as I deal with Islam most often.

I just wanted to share that little experience.  I hope everyone else had a blessed Sunday.  God bless.