Fifteen Minutes to Connect

The world would be saved through him.

Today we celebrate the feast of the Most Holy Trinity

and it is one of the core doctrines of the church,

three persons in one God.

Some of the Saints have said in the past

that one of the biggest mistakes we ever made

was trying to define the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.

Because we attempt to name and articulate and put into words

what cannot be put into any words.

It was attributed to Saint Augustine.

He said that what we tried to do in the doctrine

was to name God, but God is always ineffable.

God is always beyond our words.

There is a great deal of truth to that

because everything we say about God is by metaphor or by analogy.

We use words but they can never contain God.

These words are just constructs for us to articulate something.

But here we are and the Scripture choices today

all mentioned Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The best metaphor was given by Saint Augustine, who says that

God the father is God the lover,

the Son is the beloved

and the love that flows between them is God, the Holy Spirit.

A unity in substance, but a diversity in three persons.

Unity in diversity.

That makes even more sense when we go to the Letter of John

which says that when we love one another,

we participate in God's very self.

That is the virtuous circle of love between the father and the son.

When we love, we are entering into that virtuous circle.

In the end, God is about relationship:

Father and Son and Holy Spirit

and we are invited, as adopted sons and daughters,

into that relationship and virtuous circle, to love and to be loved.

When we do that then we are connected completely to God

and the promise of eternal life.

That love never dies.

That is what the Gospel tells us today.

God is all about relationship and love.

The challenge is it all stays up here in the head

and what we need to do is have it sink down into our heart.

We all know that relationships are important.

After experiencing the COVID pandemic,

we all came to a better understanding that we need each other.

We need community for good health

and we don't just need one person like the person we're living with.

We need more community than one person.

The idea that we could not gather in person

became not just a social inconvenience,

but became an existential threat to our good health

as individuals, as families, and even as a community.

As much as zoom and the Internet connection can sort of passivate it,

it doesn't ever really attend to our need.

Getting together in person is at the core of who we are.

We need relationship.

The surgeon general of the United States, Vivek Murthy

wrote a book about this very problem called “Together.”

He has concluded that the greatest threat

to the health of this country is loneliness.

It is a single root cause of so much physical illness

as well as mental illness in our country today.

Loneliness is this is the number one cause of stress

that leads to many mental illness issues, heart attacks, and even diabetes.

He makes all these connections of how loneliness

is critical to understanding mental and physical health in the US.

He comes up with four strategies,

and I want to highlight two of those strategies today.

He suggests that we need to rebuild

the social fabric of the United States again.

We do it in all the small ways in which we gather in our communities,

all the civil organizations, and all the religious organizations.

He holds religious gatherings to be particularly important,

not just for the health of our soul

but the health of our mind and physical bodies.

All three get nourished when we gather together in groups like Mass.

While he has four strategies I want to just highlight two of them.

The first one is:

to take fifteen minutes every day to connect with somebody you love.

It is not the person who you live with

but somebody other than the person who you live.

Connect with one person every day for fifteen minutes.

He maintains that will change your life.

The second is part of the first and

that is to give them all their attention for those fifteen minutes.

No devices, no TV, no music, no distractions!

All our attention for fifteen minutes.

That sounds pretty easy, right? Right.

I've been doing it for a month, let me tell, it is hard, really hard.

Doing this 10 or 20 years ago might not have been so hard,

but today it is way more difficult

because devices have shortened our attention span enormously.

Often in that fifteen minutes I don’t know how many times

I stretched down to my pocket thinking,

“Is that phone calling me?”

They call them phantom calls!

It can be hard to give this person who's right in front of us

all our attention for the fifteen minutes.

Let me witness, it's hard and several days in this last month,

I get to 8:00pm and I go, “Oh. Who do I call now as it is so late.

I cannot call my family on the East Coast. It's too late now.”

Then I think, “OK, do I have the energy for fifteen minutes of attention? Now”

Think about how absurd that question is.

Do I have fifteen minutes of energy to pay attention to somebody I love?

It betrays what's going on in my life.

It betrays what's going on in our lives that we've got too busy.

Too distracted, too consumed with too many things

that we can't take fifteen minutes every day to connect

with somebody whom we claim to love.

We can be better together.

That is what Church as the body of Christ is about.

Together is the ultimate definition of Church.

My challenge to you is this:

Make a list today of seven people you're going to call this week,

one for each day of the week ahead.

You can repeat it after a week if you want.

But get seven people on your list.

And say who am I going to call?

I'm going to pay attention to them for fifteen minutes for each day.

It can be your grandson or granddaughter, or your son or daughter,

or your mother or father, your grandmother or your grandfather.

It could be a long a friend that you were friends with for many years,

and as long contact with.

Or it could be a new friend who you want to contact with.

I'm not defining it for you all I am saying is

you've got about fifteen minutes every day to change our lives,

to connect, to be together again.

Unity in diversity.

It is the definition of the Trinity and when we

love like that then we are participating in God's very self.

And when we do that, we will live forever.

Fifteen Minutes to connect.