With St. Valentine’s Day around the corner, we’re happy to share an “aha moment” that took our relationship to a new level. We were at Mass one Sunday when the epistle reading took us both by surprise. Hearing it, we turned to each other at the same second, as if to say, “Did you hear what I just heard? That we ‘exist for the praise of his glory’ (Eph. 1:12)?”

The reading describes how we are adopted into the relationship between God the Father and the Son through our union with Christ. And in that new life in Christ, our purpose is clarified. It is what Jesus’ purpose has always been—to praise the Father’s glory.

And because we’re always thinking of how families are supposed to imitate the relationships between the persons of God, this made us think about what so often gets lost in relationships—the fundamental purpose of them—to see in one another an image of God and to praise his glory.

What is glory? It is magnificence or great beauty. Our life purpose is to praise God’s magnificence! Part of doing that is to imitate Him by loving one another in this way as well. When we love God, we delight and revel in his goodness, and we are supposed to do the same for one another.

But is this our fundamental mindset with our loved ones—to praise their goodness, to delight in and build them up into the person God made them to be? Truth be told, whether in marriage, parenting, or friendship, it’s so easy to focus on faults instead of good qualities. But we are losing so much in the process!

“I understood,” Viktor Frankl writes in Man’s Search for Meaning, “how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for the brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved…I was able to understand the meaning of the words, ‘The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.’”

What Frankl suggests here is a radical shift from focusing on “the world” to actually beholding God in one another, and praising him in the process. Grounded in the life of the Trinity, we are invited to gaze on our loved one—spouse, child, friend—and see them in glory, in their identity in God.

The shift toward praise has far-reaching consequences:

• We glimpse our beloved’s identity in God.

• We allow the Lord to speak to us through our beloved.

• We transcend the asphyxiating recycling of faults and blame and open ourselves to awe and wonder.

Our little “aha” moment is one we hope we don’t forget (but how forgetful we are!). It’s this: When we lose sight of the Trinitarian horizon in our relationships, we lose everything!

So as we seek to deepen Level 2—Person & Relationships—of our Trinity Houses, let’s remind ourselves that we “exist for the praise of his glory.” As we do, we will find all our relationships profoundly deepened, rooted, and aligned to praise God’s glory—as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end! Amen.