Who God Is and Who We Are In His Image
by Fr. Roger J. Landry - June 1, 2007
Today we celebrate the feast of who God is. Every Sunday is, in a very real sense, dedicated to God and therefore every Sunday really is Trinity Sunday. Since the 1300s, however, the Church has celebrated, on the Sunday immediately following Pentecost, a feast consciously dedicated to the Holy Trinity, to help all of us focus more explicitly on who God is in his profound mysterious depths, and who we're called to be made in His image and likeness.
Over the course of human history, most people have believed in some form of supernatural agency in the world. God graced the Jews with the revelation that there was only one God, the Lord, and there was no other God but Him (cf. Deut 4:35). The Lord Jesus came down from heaven to reveal to us even further the true nature of that one God: he is a mystery of three persons in a communion of love, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
"God is love," (1John 4:16) as St. John tells us, and therefore God couldn't be solitary, because no one can love in a vacuum. For love to exist, there needs to be one who loves, one who is loved, and the love that unites them. This reality of love gives us a glimpse into why God is a Trinity: from all eternity God the Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father and their eternal love is so powerful that it generates (or "spirates") the Holy Spirit. God is an eternal loving communion of persons, three persons in one God who is love.
Knowing who God is helps us to understand who we are and who we're called to be. God said in the beginning, not "Let me make man in my own image" but "Let us make man in our own image, according to our likeness." For that reason, when "God created man in his own image," he mysteriously did not create "him" but "them" and not just "any them" of two males or two females; rather, "male and female God created them" (Gen 1:26-27).
The deepest thing that can be said about the human person's dignity in the image and likeness of God, John Paul II used to stress, is not that, like God and unlike animals, the human person is endowed with the ability to reason and to choose freely. It is that the human person, like God, is called to exist as a loving communion of persons.
The fundamental and original example of that communion on earth is the marriage of a man and a woman. God has made the human person "male and female" so that they can reflect in bodily form the overflowing mystery of love found in the heart of the Trinity. When according to God's design man and woman come together in the union of one flesh, they can literally "make love," generating with God's help a third person who not only is the fruit of their loving one-flesh union, but a means by which that communion continues to grow and deepen.
That's why marriage in God's plan is so important. For the vast majority of God's children, marriage is the means by which they discover and become who they really are, a fruitful communion of persons in love in God's image and likeness.
When attempts are made to try to change the reality of marriage to include two men or two women, we not only disfigure the meaning of marriage, which, as the building block of society, is so important for the future of civilization. We also deface the central truth about the image of God in us.
That's why same-sex pseudo-matrimony is against the dignity even of those who seek it. Our dignity is based ultimately on our being made in the image and likeness of God and called, through the analogy of the matrimonial communion of persons in love, to enter into communion with the loving communion of persons who is the Blessed Trinity. Same-sex neither reflect that image or lead to that communion.
In distorting the meaning God has given to masculinity and femininity, to marriage, to the complementary nuptial love which is the basis of marriage, and to family as the communion of persons flowing from the one-flesh union of marriage, same-sex unions also risk deforming two realities far more elemental and important: the identity of God and the identity of the human person made in God's image.
That's why the efforts to legally restore marriage in our Commonwealth to its true and only meaning are so important and why those who truly believe in God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in our Commonwealth are working so hard in preparation for the June 14th Constitutional Convention.
Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.
