Peace and Rest

What is the meaning of the Christian belief in the Trinity? Of what value is it for our daily lives?

God has done marvellous things by creating the world from nothing. But before God worked, he reposed in peace with himself – Father loving the Son, Son delighting in the Father, and the love between them being the Holy Spirit, the Comforter:

Peace is his everlasting state; in this world of space and time he has worked and acted; but from everlasting it was not so. For six days he worked, and then he rested according to that rest which was his eternal state …

God has done marvellous things by re-creating the world in and through his Son’s passion, death and resurrection. But again, God’s peace is his natural, everlasting state:

The redemption is a series of great and continued works, but still they all tend to rest and peace, as at the first. They began out of rest, and they end in rest. They end in that eternal state out of which they began.

Baptised into the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, we are called to live in the peace and rest of God himself, despite the darkness, emptiness and chaos that can and does surround us:

God is the God of peace, and in giving us peace he gives himself to us, he manifests himself to us; for his presence is peace. …

He does not bring into being peace and love as part of his creation, but he is himself peace and love from eternity, and he blesses us by making us partakers of himself.

The gift of faith enables us to receive God in a way that no one – literally no one – would have thought possible. God, “perfect and blessed in himself,” shares his very life with us. Thus, we live in peace and rest, because we belong to God.

“All our troubles and pleasures, all our anxieties, fears, doubts, difficulties, hopes, encouragements, afflictions, losses, attainments” we place before, in and with the God of peace.

The beginning is peace and rest. The end is peace and rest. So, naturally enough, the journey is full of peace and rest.

And the journey is our life and begins now. May the peace and rest of God be ours, now and forever. Amen.

Excerpts are taken from a homily by Blessed John Henry Newman: Peace in Believing. Newman (1801-1890) lived in England and converted to Catholicism in 1845. He was a poet, and an outstanding theologian.