When was the last time you got goosebumps?

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If the Holy Trinity were merely a mathematical mystery of how one can be three and three can be one, then only a few people would find it exciting. But if our belief in the Trinity is telling us something essential about God, then this can be truly mind-blowing, heart-stopping, and soul-stirring.

If God were a solitary being who loved only himself, that would amount to mere selfishness. True love requires relationship. In God, there must be a Lover (often identified as the Father) and a Beloved (the Son). Yet love confined to two risks becoming closed, private, even exclusive. Authentic love is expansive; it longs to be shared. It cannot simply circle back and forth between Lover and Beloved. It must overflow to a third.

Richard of St. Victor, the 12th-century theologian and mystic, saw the Holy Spirit as this third, the Co?Beloved. For love to be perfect, it cannot remain merely mutual; it must be communal.

I see this in healthy marriages. The love between husband and wife does not end with them; they become more loving toward other people as well. The love between spouses extends to their children, to their relatives, and even to those beyond their own flesh and blood—strangers whom they welcome into their lives.

So it is with God. The Trinity is Perfect Love among the Lover, the Beloved, and the Co-Beloved. At the core of God is relationship and community. If we are created in the image and likeness of God, then we are most like God and most like the selves God dreamed for us to be when we engage in relationships and build community.

The Trinity is not just coexistence or tolerance. I think it is a dynamic of awe, pagkamangha. The Father and the Spirit are in awe of the Son:

After Jesus was baptized, he came up from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened [for him], and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove [and] coming upon him. And a voice came from the heavens, saying, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well-pleased” (Matthew 3:16-17).

For me, “well-pleased” is too sedate a translation. The original Greek word is eudokeo, from eu (good or well) and dokeo (to think or suppose). Elsewhere in Scripture, eudokeo has been rendered as finding delight. But dokeo is related to the word doxa, glory. So you can say the Father “gloried” in the Son, and the Spirit rushed to Jesus.

Jesus, inspired by the Spirit, is in awe of the Father: “At that very moment, he rejoiced [in] the Holy Spirit and said, “I give you praise, Father, Lord of heaven and earth…” (Luke 10:21). I think a Filipino word that captures what Jesus was going through in this scene is napabulalas—he burst out glorifying the Father, he couldn’t contain the overwhelming joy breathed out by the Spirit.

Jesus is also in awe of the Spirit, the gift of the Father: “When the Advocate comes whom I will send you from the Father, the Spirit of truth that proceeds from the Father, he will testify to me” (John 15:26). Jesus is certain that Spirit-empowered disciples will be able to continue his mission.

These days, we have tamed awe—that trembling wonder before the vast and the holy—and trivialized it into mere cuteness: “Awww” (delivered with a singsong lilt). Where prophets once fell to their knees dumbfounded, we now give a token squeal before scrolling to the next Instagram curiosity. While once meant to jolt us and call us to live larger, awe has been domesticated and house?trained into sentimentality.

This is the experience the poet laureate Andrea Gibson wakes up from in the poem, “Acceptance Speech After Setting the World Record in Goosebumps.” They had treated astonishment as a joke until they felt something that could be captured only by one word: goosebumps. And from then on, they started counting goosebumps not as a greedy accountant but as a grateful devotee.

Their tally:

My baby sister, sober for the first time
in thirteen years, calling to tell me she just noticed
our mother's eyes are green:
        505 goosebumps...

Blood donors in Sweden receive
A thank-you message when their blood is used:
        301 Nordic goosebumps...

One night in Ann Arbor, my friend
still undiagnosed, could not uncurl her fingers
to strum her guitar, so she sang the chords instead.
It was the first time in my life I'd seen pain
become an instrument:
        10 dozen goosebumps...

This is not just coexisting and tolerating community. It is a dynamic of awe, pagkamangha. When was the last time you got goosebumps because of community?

The poem ends with this verse:

There is no escaping the magic now.
Beauty caught me and never let me go.
And the thing about the world record
Is—if someone breaks it after me,
and they will break it after me,
I will love that so much
that without even trying,
        I'll break it again.

So it is with God. The Father in awe of the Son in awe of the Spirit in awe of the Father and so on… and this overflows to us. I think that many times—more times than we think—God is also in awe of us. When was the last time you got goosebumps because of God?

Your prayer assignment this week:

Instead of a song, listen to a spoken word performance. The text of Andrea Gibson’s poem is here: https://davidhusted.com/blogs/1-sleeping-softly-in-this-bed/posts/7294180/poem-of-the-year.

To give you more goosebumps, that poem was written around the time Andrea Gibson was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.

Celebrate Trinity Sunday by meditating on the poem. The Trinity is in awe of each other and of us. Ask for the grace of awe. It is one of the first steps toward loving God and loving your community.

Fr. Francis teaches Theology, Education and Scripture at both the Ateneo de Manila University and Loyola School of Theology. As a classroom teacher, he is first and foremost a student. As a professor, he sees himself primarily as a pastor.