From the Rector

"... faith for all defects supplying,
where the feeble sense fail."
(Pange Lingua, "Sing, My Tongue," hymn by Saint Thomas Aquinas, 1225-1274)

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Dear friends, 

During my last two years of high school, my dad and I ate breakfast together every week and spent months discussing the First Epistle of John. The Spirit worked in us through rye toast as much as the Bible. The passage that strikes me to this day is this: “No one has ever seen God" (1 John 4:12). This echoes what John writes in the Prologue to the Gospel: "No one hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him" (John 1:18).

It's a strange admission from the apostle whose Gospel and epistles have shaped and inspired Christian faith for two thousand years. John’s words stick with me because if no one has ever seen God, then what is the substance of the faith we've received? To whom, or to what, is it directed?

It's a question especially relevant for this Sunday, the first after Pentecost, when the Church celebrates the revelation of the Triune God, who is three and one, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; which we affirm as less of an idea or proposition to parse logically than an creedal affirmation of faith, hope, and love.  

We confess in the Creeds, “We believe in God,” and surely, we need some sense of the God in whom we believe and to whom we offer our souls and bodies. "We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ," we go on to say, and "We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son."

Faith is a self-offering to God of the heart made possible by truth and love. Truth makes love possible, as someone has said, and love makes truth bearable. Human love ordinarily rests upon sight. We behold the beloved, and in beholding we learn little by little to love. But again, “no one has ever seen God," so on what sort of encounter does our faith in and love of God rest?

We learn pretty quickly that we can't finally reduce faith in God to passing feelings, moods, or personal preferences. The paradox of faith seeking understanding, a pursuit as old as the Church itself, reminds me of a quote from Blaise Pascal's posthumous work Matthew 28:20: “You would not be searching for me,” Pascal wrote, “unless you had already found me.” Faith in the God no one has ever seen is at once inexplicable and undeniable.

John says elsewhere in his first letter, "We love because he first loved us" (1 John 4:19), and we see this love at work in God's Son and in our hearts too by the Spirit that he has given to lead us.

Feelings change with the weather and the whims of taste, but faith and prayer persist despite odds, fixed and immovable, beating in our heart like a child to be born. “Deep calls to deep," the psalmist wrote (Ps. 42:7). In silence and stillness, facing the unknown, Christ's presence abides, his voice, his Body and Blood to taste and see. And faith becomes the response of our whole being to the one who first sought us. 

I'm thankful that faith doesn't require me to construct it for myself. It is a gift continually given, until God ceases to be merely a word and becomes a hidden wellspring of light and love and life itself.

The Gospel appointed for Trinity Sunday ends with a promise I know you'll remember. Jesus tells his disciples, "I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen" (Matthew 28:20). And we might add, boldly, in the unknowing I am with you always, until we see face to face.

Yours in Christ's unfailing love,

Fr. Peter