May 26 , 2024 (Trinity Sunday)

Father Ken’s Message:

Good afternoon and welcome to the Catholic Cathedral of Sapporo. Today is Trinity Sunday. God can be explained as a relationship between three persons: Father; Son; and Holy Spirit. Therefore, when God made us human beings in his image and likeness, we too were made to be in relationship with one another. This is why we human beings reach out for relationship with God through prayer, and with one another through friendship. Every greeting we give to one another is proof of our origin in the Holy Trinity. Every prayer we make to God, every Mass we attend to praise God is proof that we are in relationship with God in the Trinity. Knowing that spiritual background about us it makes sense that rejection from others really hurts us and why the best moments in our life are when we are accepted by other people. Relationships are the goal of our life. To be a whole person, we look for a relationship with other human beings, and to be a healthy Catholic we look also for a relationship with God.

Today’s feast day makes me think of two things, one is a movie I like and another is an experience I had last week at my work place. The first thing is about watching the movie Castaway with Tom Hanks. Have any of you seen it? It is about an employee for Federal Express International package service. His plane crashes on an island in the Pacific Ocean and he is stranded alone on the island for four years. After the plane crash some of the packages drift ashore to the island and he uses the contents to survive. One of them is a volleyball. To overcome his loneliness, he paints a face on it and talks to it like it is a friend to give him the feeling of companionship in his isolation. He even names it “Wilson” after the name of the company who made it. Having a relationship with a volleyball seems stupid, but it shows how much we human beings were made for one another and for relationships.

The second thing happened last week at the Catholic college where I teach a lovely young women came to my office an hour before class was to start and started crying in front of me. She explained to me that the group she was assigned to for groupwork had rejected her the week before and she did not want to attend the class this day. I gave her permission to go to our college library and study by herself. I think all of us can understand that girl’s heartbreak. All of us in life have been abandoned in ways, rejected or ignored by family, friends or coworkers at a time, either on purpose or by accident. The feelings of sadness in those experiences are evidence that we human beings were really made to be together and not alone.

That is why God noticing our human tendency for loneliness when he made the first man Adam also created Eve to be his friend. At that moment God said, “It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him” (Genesis 2:18). We human beings need other human beings. All of us have had the unhappy experience of going to a movie by ourselves or out to dinner by ourselves. It is nice but such experiences would be better with friends or family. Here at the Catholic Center 4 of us unmarried priests on the last Sunday of the month try to go out to dinner together to build brotherhood and community between us. Such experiences are evidence of our belonging to the Holy Trinity; it is our spirituality to be together. It is the reason we feel at home in our Catholic Church, even though we are not related by blood, instead we have a relationship made by loving one another by love.

Today’s feast of the Trinity should encourage all of us in our families, friendships, and in our work places with coworkers to be dedicated to relationship building. One way to build relationships is to cooperate and not compete, to compliment and not complain, and to seek the common good instead of individual glory. I think St. Francis of Assisi is a good model for us to live in an attitude of the Trinity. He saw relationship with all things created by God. The sun was his brother, the moon was his sister, the wolf was his brother, etc. My brother and sister Catholics on this beautiful feast of the Holy Trinity that explains our human origins in God, let us thank God for the gift of our lives and for the lives of all others in our life story, and strive to live like God in peace and love with one another through a friendly relationship. Thank you very much. Father Ken