Today is Trinity Sunday, the one feast in the year when we honour God for himself alone.  In all the other festivals we commemorate some benefit which his love has brought us.  At Christmas we rejoice in the salvation which Christ was born to bring; at Easter in that eternal life that can be ours through the Risen Christ; at Pentecost in the power of the Holy Spirit by whose aid we can attain it.

Today, however, we honour God for his own sake, for what-he-himself-is-in-his-eternal-glory.  In the words of Revelation, “Worthy art thou, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honour and power, for thou didst create all things, and by thy will they existed and were created” (RSV Catholic edition, 4:11).  And there is the very essence and spirit of that worship for which the cathedrals were built and for which we ourselves have been created.

What then is meant by that familiar word ‘worship’?  It has been defined as “…the total adoring response of man to the one Eternal God self-revealed in time”. (1) Its quality, therefore, will depend first on our knowledge of God and then on the love for him which that knowledge kindles in our hearts; and its effects will permeate our whole selves and therefore be evident in our whole life.

Everyone’s attitude to God is determined in the first place by his or her ideas of what God is like; or, to put it from another point of view, one’s attitude is determined by how far one has grasped God’s own revelation of himself.  The ideas of God which those medieval architects and craftsmen held, may be seen from what they built.