Terry Fitzgibbons ‘04

Today’s Gospel and the feast of the Trinity remind us that, ultimately, God is relationship. God is not theory, not distant. God is incarnate and alive in our experience. “God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son” to break through to us—not just one time 2,000 years ago but on a daily basis. God continues to breaks through. God is movement.

Eastbound on I-78 in Newark on a weekday morning is an unlikely place and time for contemplation. Movement and noise abound: aggressive drivers vie for position towards the Holland Tunnel, planes leave Newark Liberty Airport, ships enter Port Newark, freight trains haul goods from the port inland, and trucks on the I-95 underpass rumble en route to Maine or Florida and points in between. From the peak of the Casciano Memorial Bridge, you see the Manhattan skyline accentuated by the Empire State Building and One World Trade Center, the back of the Statue of Liberty, then Brooklyn, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, and finally Staten Island and the Bayonne Bridge. Millions of people in these communities, literally, rise and hum below. The world is alive and abuzz.       

The view atop that bridge—a privilege each morning—is a snapshot of civilization, with all of its promises and perils: the hope of Ellis Island and the horror of September 11; the marvel of our architecture and the bane of our pollution; the economic progress we’ve made and the people still left out; many people heading joyfully to their daily labor and other people racing anxiously to the next task, unaware of their neighbors around them; relationships forged and deepened and other relationships broken. All of this, the good and the bad, God envelops.

We are saved—Amen!—but only through relationship and through community, which reflects, however dimly, the inner life of the Trinity. There is no such thing as a self-made person. If we believe that, we are condemned already.