Becoming a Community of Love, by Fr. Evan Armatas
In the first article in this series I examined the ultimate challenge each community faces, that of becoming a community of love. The second article in this series, looked at what it means to love, and the preconditions needed for love to exist. In this last article, we will examine the Ultimate model of love, the Trinity, and how learning to live like the Trinity saves us.
Last month, I argued that the main precondition for love was a relationship. Love, I argued, couldn’t exist for the individual. For love to exist there must be at least two persons. Love only exists within a community.
Now, our faith teaches that each of us has been made in the image and likeness of God (Genesis). We could say that humanity or society itself is also made in God’s image and likeness. Yet, although we are made in God’s image we don’t always live our lives in a way that resembles God. One of the reasons we know this is because God’s love is perfect whereas our ability to love is a work in progress. Proof of this is that daily we struggle, fall, and attempt to better the way we live. Another way of saying this is to say that although we are made in God’s image we don’t always live like God.
During each Divine Liturgy, we sing the following hymn after we receive communion: “We have seen the true light; we have received the heavenly Spirit; we have found the true faith, worshiping the undivided Trinity, for the Trinity has saved us.” Each of us might ask, however, how does the Trinity save us? The answer is rather simple. The Trinity saves us because the Trinity teaches us how to love, how to be truly human.
The Trinity is a community of Three Persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. These three Persons, dwell in a state of perfect love and perfect communion with one another. When Christ was on earth he modeled this by entering into relationships with us, sharing his Divine Love. He showed perfect love by living totally for others. Now, when we imitate his love we learn to live in communion with one another. Our life then becomes a series of relationships with others, and we find ourselves in a community of love. This is how we were meant to live.
Earlier it was mentioned that our ability to love is not perfect, that each of us struggles to live the way God made us. It is God that gives us the model through which we find our way back to right living. God, Whose image we were made in, as was said earlier, models perfect love through Jesus Christ. He is the way, the truth, and the life. He shows us that loving one another is our first priority. Moreover, he shows us that when we place love as our first priority our likeness to God grows each day.
In living like the Trinity, then, we reshape our imperfect love. We learn to make better choices, we learn to choose love over hate, or indifference, and thus we learn to be human again. Made in God’s image, we strive to attain through how we live our lives, the likeness of God. Living in God’s likeness then means that we live like the Trinity, in a community of love.
Bishop Kallistos Ware puts it this way in his book, The Orthodox Way, “, “Each [of us] becomes a real person only through entering into relation with other persons, through living for them and in them. There can be no man, so it has been rightly said, until there are at least two men in communication. The same is true, secondly, of love. Love cannot exist in isolation, but presupposes the other. . . And that is precisely what the doctrine of the Holy Trinity means. At the very heart of the divine life, from all eternity God knows himself as ‘I and Thou’ in a threefold way, and he rejoices continually in this knowledge” p. 28.
Ultimately our ability to live in a Trinitarian manner is what saves us. We will indeed become a community of love when we become persons who dwell in a state of love and communion. When we seek to reach out to others with love, never seeking our own desires first but those we are fortunate enough to know.