Trinity Sunday, 2025

Dear Sisters and Associates,

Trinity Sunday is the great feast of relationship.  Our God, triune in nature, is all about community, about collaboration, about presence.  Our community also calls this Providence Sunday, a day we recognize that our God is radically personal and present, providing for us, inviting us into this communion of love among the Father, the Son and the Spirit. 

Often when we think of Trinity we think of Mystery, and mystery is not fully or totally understood.  I’m not a theologian and I don’t pretend to be one or able to explain the Trinity.  But what I do know is our God is with us.  We belong to God.  We’re connected to God at the very core and essence of our being.  We live our lives as Providence people; we learn and grow together, we trust that Providence leads us in good times and challenging times.  In moments of grace when we truly sense God, as well as those times when we don’t, God is still there.  God accompanies us and wants to be in this deep relationship with us. 

How do we maintain that relationship in our lives?  I think it takes listening—a special kind of listening—a listening with our heart to hear the tenderness of God speaking to us.  When we do this deep listening, it changes us, transforms us, invites us to have a tenderness not only toward our own community or family, but toward all our brothers and sisters, thus creating a circle of love and relationship in our world. 

Our mission, as co-creators with God, is to bring God’s love and grace to the world—to make the face of Providence more visible.  Practically speaking, what might that mean?  Because God is relationship, is Love, the Trinity demands of us to be available to others, to be a loving and life-giving gift to them.  Trinity asks us to stand alongside people in their pain, to cry with them in their grief, to rejoice with them when they have good news, to stand up against oppressive systems that dehumanize people.  Our Triune God invites us to shine the light of justice on those who misuse power, to those who tell lies and falsehoods, to speak up for those whose voices are silenced.  Why?  Because we are made in the image of this Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and this model of “relationship” is about community and communion, about collaboration and presence. 

On this Trinity Sunday, may we ask ourselves:  What can I do for others so that our world is permeated with compassion, mutuality, joy and peace?  In the ways that we are community for each other, how will we live into God’s providence together? 

May our Triune God accompany us on this journey!

Sr. Barbara McMullen, Congregational Leader