... we contemplate the Most Holy Trinity as Jesus
introduced us to it. He revealed to us that God is love "not in the
oneness of a single Person, but in the Trinity of one substance" (Preface).
He is the Creator and merciful Father; he is the Only-Begotten Son, eternal
Wisdom incarnate, who died and rose for us; he is the Holy Spirit who moves all
things, cosmos and history, toward their final, full recapitulation. Three
Persons who are one God because the Father is love, the Son is love, the Spirit
is love. God is wholly and only love, the purest, infinite and eternal love. He
does not live in splendid solitude but rather is an inexhaustible source of
life that is ceaselessly given and communicated. To a certain extent we can
perceive this by observing both the macro-universe: our earth, the planets, the
stars, the galaxies; and the micro-universe: cells, atoms, elementary
particles. The "name" of the Blessed Trinity is, in a certain sense,
imprinted upon all things because all that exists, down to the last particle,
is in relation; in this way we catch a glimpse of God as relationship and
ultimately, Creator Love. All things derive from love, aspire to love and move
impelled by love, though naturally with varying degrees of awareness and
freedom. "O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the
earth!" (Ps 8: 1) the Psalmist exclaims. In speaking of the
"name", the Bible refers to God himself, his truest identity. It is
an identity that shines upon the whole of Creation, in which all beings for the
very fact that they exist and because of the "fabric" of which they
are made point to a transcendent Principle, to eternal and infinite Life which
is given, in a word, to Love. "In him we live and move and have our
being", St Paul said at the Areopagus of Athens (Acts 17: 28). The
strongest proof that we are made in the image of the Trinity is this: love
alone makes us happy because we live in a relationship, and we live to love and
to be loved. Borrowing an analogy from biology, we could say that imprinted
upon his "genome", the human being bears a profound mark of the
Trinity, of God as Love.(Pope Benedict XVI, 7 June 2009)
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