The family of God

By Tom Quiner

The Quiners celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary

Two beautiful occasions united last Sunday: the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity and my 40th wedding anniversary.

The Holy Trinity is simple and complicated at the same, a true mystery. The Catholic Church describes the Trinity as one God, three Persons.

Jesus is the Son of God. The Holy Spirit is the exchange of Love that burns between the Father and the Son.

This Spirit is a Person.

This Son is a person.

God is a person.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church goes further on the subject:

“It is the Father who generates, the Son who is begotten, and the Holy Spirit who proceeds.” The divine Unity is Triune.

Together, they symbolize a family structure that is not only built on Love, it is Love itself.

A marriage between a man and a women reflects this Love, nourished as it is by the Holy Spirit burning in our souls. Saint John Paul the Great built on this theme in an apostolic letter, “Mulieris Dignitate” in 1988:

The fact that man “created as man and woman” is the image of God means not only that each of them individually is like God, as a rational and free being.

It also means that man and woman, created as a “unity of the two” in their common humanity, are called to live in a communion of love, and in this way to mirror in the world the communion of love that is in God, through which the Three Persons love each other in the intimate mystery of the one divine life.

The Father, Son and Holy Spirit, one God through the unity of the divinity, exist as persons through the inscrutable divine relationship. Only in this way can we understand the truth that God in himself is love (cf. 1 Jn 4:16).

I like that. My marriage mirrors the Holy Trinity. It is an ‘intimate mystery.’

At Mass last Sunday at, fittingly, Holy Trinity Catholic Church, our priest invited us up before the entire parish. He stood us right in front of the altar and prayed a beautiful blessing upon us as the entire congregation extended their hands, united in the prayer.

Family is an essential component of our human existence. Karen and I had all of our children and grandchildren present on Sunday to bless us in prayer at Mass.

They are our human family, the fruit of our sacramental marriage.

But we’re part of an even larger family, the family of God, who shared in our prayer on that beautiful day.

Forty years is a long time to be married. I wouldn’t have traded a day of it.