Welcome all to this reflection on Trinity Sunday and the readings for today.  In Proverbs we hear beautiful calming reassurances of the Divine’s intention and love for humanity.  Moving to Romans we hear what I find is a conflicting message of hope born through hardship.  Lastly the gospel reminds us of the power and arrival of the Divine Spirit.  

I want to start with the second reading where we hear:

We even boast of our afflictions,
knowing that affliction produces endurance,
and endurance, proven character,
and proven character, hope,
and hope does not disappoint.

This reading applies a lot of meaning to suffering, which is convenient to help answer the age-old question of ‘why do bad things happen to good people?’. But I think it is dangerous to glorify suffering. Sometimes an experience or action is just objectively awful and by forcing it into a redemptive or productive framework one risks minimizing the damage for the sake of avoiding sitting in the discomfort.  Perhaps suffering can make some people more resilient but it is not free and it comes at a cost that is not necessarily hope giving.

From my life as a queer transwoman one of the hardest times in my life was realizing the only way to continue living was through accepting and living out my transness which would certainly mean losing a majority of my biological family. What followed this realization was two years of preparation, slowly watching my heart break preparing to come out.  I was scared every little step; it did not feel like endurance - it felt like a fight to stay alive. There was not a hope for a better future. Rather there was a struggle to find a future at all.  Now being several years on the other side of coming out and processing the rejection from my family, I don’t live in hope of reconciliation or being reunited with my family.  Rather I live in peace with this reality, moving forward finding family in new places not tied to biology.  

The poet Meg Day touches on this concept of the cost of suffering in their poem “Batter My Heart, Transgender’d God” :

place fear in my heart
where faith has grown my senses dull & reassures
my blood that it will never spill.

For many, where faith or hope would normally grow, the painful realities of the world check this growth. On this Trinity Sunday I think of the crucifixion, probably the hardest day within the Trinity.  A suffering Christ cries out “My God, My God? why have you forsaken me?” And later, as death sets in, cries out, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” This is not full of hope; this is heartbroken pain followed by resignation.  To echo Meg Day, fear has replaced faith for Christ in this intense moment of suffering. That speaks to how profoundly human this response is that even the Divine child’s faith is changed by it.

All this feels so far from the beautiful depictions from the first reading. Where are the idyllic scenes of playing upon the surface of the earth with the Creator delighting in us?  For me, I wonder what would my faith look like if it was unchecked by harsh realities, how it would grow unbounded.  What if that little 5-year-old girl who used to let herself daydream of being herself never lost her innocent self-acceptance to the bigoted guilt-filled messaging she was surrounded by? This is actually where I find my source of hope. Not a hope for my own faith, for I am at peace with the realities of my life and how it has shaped my beliefs - but a desire to help create a world where the lives that come after me can live closer to this ideal shown in the first reading.

In the gospel we hear Christ talk about the coming of the Spirit, bringing the fullness of truth to the people. We hear ‘I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now.’ The realities of Christ’s world curbed the vastness of truth that is our world. The role of the Holy Spirit here is to continuously bring that enlightened truth into the world as the world is ready for it. Just think what more good news is there to discover ahead of us all if we just make room for it!  So let us take this Sunday to remind ourselves that we are the hands of the Divine; we can shape a future driven by hope; that the Divine truths that were too vast for our reality will, in time, grow truly unbounded into eternity.