Trinity Sunday

Celebrate Trinity Sunday, June 15

This Sunday, June 15, we celebrate Trinity Sunday, one of the seven principal feasts of the Church Year. Always observed on the First Sunday after Pentecost, Trinity Sunday invites us to glorify the mystery of God’s own life: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—in Trinity of Persons and in Unity of Being (Preface for Trinity Sunday, BCP 380).

Unlike other feasts that commemorate events in the life of Christ or the Saints, Trinity Sunday focuses solely on who God is. The Church gives thanks for the one eternal God known to us in love, revealed in Jesus Christ, and present by the Holy Spirit.

The feast has been observed in the Western Church since the 14th century and is associated with Saint Thomas Becket, who was consecrated bishop on Trinity Sunday in 1162. His martyrdom helped popularize the feast, especially in England, where the Sundays following were once named “Sundays after Trinity”—a tradition preserved in older prayer books and the Sarum Missal.

Come rejoice in the mystery and majesty of God—One in Three and Three in One.

+ 

A Modern Hymn to the Holy Trinity from J. Mohr: Cantiones Sacrae, Pustet, 1891.

Praise to thee, God the Father, 
and to thy Son who became our
brother in this exile. From both
proceeds the holy Comforter,
together with the Father and the Son
God and Lord. Lord have mercy.

Join all souls in the bond of union
and fasten close the ties of love. Let
not our sins provoke thee to
vengeance, but grant forgiveness while
we repent of them. Lord have mercy.

Grant that we may receive worthily
the holy viaticum*, that we may be
defended by this shield at the end
of life. Grant that we be joined in joy
to thy heavenly court, there to see 
thy mysteries. Lord have mercy. 

*The "viaticum" is the Last Sacrament of the Christian, the Holy Eucharist offered in the liturgy of Last Rites to those near or in danger of death.