Until this day, the effect of the alteration strange and beautiful comes to all of those upon whom the grace of God has blown. That means, dearest ones, that we now live inside the three Persons, though it takes a great act of faith it takes to confess that.

In our existence, and in a world which seems increasingly closed in upon itself, where we witness in our time the implosion of individuality, it takes a great act of faith to confess that. Nevertheless, the mystery of Pentecost proclaims to us that we live inside God, and not in a way that we cease to be the human creatures that we are; not in a way in which our personhood is in any way diminished, but instead, it is enlarged.

How is it enlarged? Well, we shall know that in the age to come, in the regeneration, when we shall partake of those things that the Church’s prayer of thanksgiving says are still are unknown to us: “We give thanks to the things that are known and unknown.”

What is unknown to us? What is unknown to us, yet already has been given to us, is that when we shall fully live inside the one God in three persons, in the three divine persons, we shall also–all of us—live within each other. Ponder that for a moment.

Each of us, all–and I don’t mean the few of us here. But all of those persons created in the image and likeness of God from Adam until the end. Each of those, who reach their destiny, upon whom the grace of God has blown and have become transformed with the alteration strange and beautiful, shall live inside each other with a capacity that is limitless.

Our minds collapse when we try to imagine eternity because we are confined in time and find it difficult to get past the notion of time that goes on and on. Yet that will be no more, but instead, there will be the eternity of God. God will be all in all, says St. Paul. And in that God being all in all, all who are in God will be “all” in each other.

Can you imagine just for a moment: each one of us, every angelic and human person that has been created by the one God in three persons, having a limitless capacity for the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit? Can you imagine the immensity of that?

People who experience human love in this world – in marriage, in true friendship–have a small reflection of that “insidedness.” Often, spouses and friends who love each other suffer from love. Love makes them suffer. With the taste of the love that they have, comes the experience of its limitations; there is still an “outsidedness” that prevents the within-ness from being complete.

What about when that outsidedness is removed and doesn’t exist anymore? All outsidedness with God removed! All outsidedness with each other removed!

And everything that is experienced of the divine Persons and of the human persons and of the angelic persons is a limitless banquet of delight and beauty and perfection!

What about that? There will be no end! ‘

‘Then shall I know, even as I am known,’ says St. Paul when he speaks of faith, hope and love abiding and the greatest of these is love. Then shall I know even as I am known!

So, dearest ones, on the day of Pentecost, let us exult in this mystery of insidedness, withinness, and magnify the one God in three persons, as persons created by Him, who by His unimaginable love, have become transformed with the alteration strange and beautiful that He has breathed upon us.

Then neither life nor death nor things present nor things to come nor any other thing can separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of us, Your faithful, and enkindle in us the fire of Your love, now and unto the endless ages. Amen.

The second cause is the Ascension of the Lord, when He is exalted over the earth and crosses the threshold back into eternity from where He came. But, you see, He did not come from eternity bearing humanity. He returned to it (eternity) bearing humanity, clothed in humanity, not in a garment that one takes off, but in that which has become part of Him.

With our humanity, the Son of God crosses the threshold of eternity, and this is also another cause that has an effect in the very heart of things.   And that effect is that the life of God is poured out upon the world, as a result of the entry of a piece of that world into eternity in the ascended body of the Lord. So there is cause and effect, and action and reaction in the work of God, in the very heart of things.

That life-giving power, as wind and as fire–not wind and fire but as wind and as fire–came down during Pentecost and drove the apostles forth to breathe on the world, as God had breathed on them; and we, upon whom the grace of God has blown, have grown bright and radiant as lightning transformed with an alteration strange and beautiful. Well, that is an introduction to what the alteration is. Now we must speak of the alteration itself–its strangeness and its beauty.

The alteration that we have received, that has been breathed upon us, that has made us strange and beautiful, is that we have received what Jesus our Lord speaks of in the Gospel as the gift of God, the living water. In receiving it, we have become sources of it. The living water has come to us and now gushes up within us unto life everlasting.

What is life everlasting? It is the life of the one God in three Persons, and those three Persons live inside each other. They do not live external to each other, but within each other. Though they live within each other, their unique Personhood is in no way diminished but magnified.

The great iconographer Andrei Rublev has, as far as it is possible to do so with art, captured that in the icon of The Trinity. All of the three Persons are shown there as having eyes only for each other, the Son and Spirit having their source, their origin in the Father. Yet the Son and the Spirit do not have an origin and source in time but in the Father. So in that eternity, they live in each other!

How great a mystery that is for creatures like us who have endured the curse of the fall and death and live outside of each other–and outside the one God in three persons. God partially reveals Himself, but the reason why the revelation is partial in the Old Covenant is that you still can’t get in! “Moses, you have seen My back, but you cannot see my face” [God says].

Father David Anderson is pastor of Saint Peters Eastern Catholic Church in Ukiah, California. This homily was given May 2016.

“Magnify, O my soul, the one God in three Persons,” St. Gregory the Theologian said, while speaking on the day of Pentecost, words which have been set to song by the Church to the services of this day by the great hymnographers, especially St. John of Damascus: “We celebrate the day of Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit, the appointed day for the promise, the fulfillment of our hope, a breathing which is the breath of God, a present share in the tongues of fire.”

A breathing, which is the breath of God, and a present share in the tongues of fire – that is the fulfillment of our hope, which has been given to us in the coming of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost.

For 33 years now, as I have preached on Pentecost, at some point I say the last verse of the Matins canon: All of us, upon whom the grace of God has blown, have become radiant as lightning, transformed with an alteration strange and beautiful.

What is this alteration strange and beautiful, which is the fulfillment of our hope, and the present share in the inheritance God gives to his own? To know what it is, not only with the mind but with the entire being, we must begin from the world that we observe and the life that we live in it–and that is, everything happens as a result of causes and effects, actions and reactions.

We observe this constantly. We observe it so much that perhaps we don’t even think of it, even though it surrounds us constantly: causes and effects. The reason why the world operates and life seems to operate by causes and effects is that everything is a faint reflection of how God is, how God works.

In this Paschal time, we have celebrated and partaken of what could be called the two great causes and effects of our God. First, the cause of the voluntary death of the Son of God made flesh. He, who is utterly in His personhood outside creation, entered that creation and gave His life for that creation voluntarily, as an act of His will. This is a cause.

And it produces an effect, an effect in the very heart of things, so much beyond and so much deeper even than all the causes and effects that scientists can observe in the universe. The effect caused by the voluntary death of the Lord Jesus Christ is His Resurrection. His death causes it, because it is a singular death of a singular person, who uniquely and voluntarily enters into death with our humanity and thus unravels it.

We hear of that unraveling in the accounts of the Lord’s death in the Gospels; even the cosmos bears witness to it, and we could say, some of the dead prematurely come forth because at the very depths of existence, death is despoiled of its power. And so, we proclaim that not one dead remains in the tombs, because Christ is risen. His death causes His Resurrection. By His Cross, joy has come into the world. (to be continued)