The Holy Trinity
W
ith last Sunday, Pentecost, the Easter season came to an end. Through Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter the Church has been reliving redemption, stage by stage: the coming of the Son, the mysteries of his life, death and resurrection, and - their fruit - the coming of the Holy Spirit. But now those days have gone: the Church’s four seasons have run their course. What, we wonder, happens next? What does the Church do now? She keeps, in swift succession, three great feasts: today’s feast of the Holy Trinity, next Thursday’s feast of Corpus Christi and, at the end of the following week, the feast of the Sacred Heart.1 These three feasts go together. They are all of more recent foundation than the great feasts of Christmas and Easter. Whereas those last go back to the early centuries of the Church, we owe the feasts of the Trinity and Corpus Christi to the Middle Ages and that of the Sacred Heart to the seventeenth century. But they go together, above all, because they have a common purpose. They each in a different way do the same thing. It is as if the Church, after the drama of her four seasons, pauses for a moment and draws breath. She looks back along the road she has
b. Words for the Feasts and Saints Days.indd 11
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