Our kids’ high school band director stood, beaming before the packed auditorium. “How good it is,” he said, “to be back, playing music together!” The audience erupted in sustained applause. This is no rookie band teacher. He’s in his 47^th year of teaching. So we approached him after the concert to thank him and ask how things are going.
 
“I’ve got freshmen coming in playing at a 7^th-grade level,” he shared. “Many have just quit music altogether. I really need ten trumpets. I’ve got two.” We listened attentively, knowing that we were in the presence of an institution, the living memory of music in this community. “Somehow teaching music to a screen full of avatars for a year-and-a-half,” he smiled, shaking his head, “didn’t do much for band.”
 
We may not all be in bands, but the director’s comments are applicable to so many aspects of pandemic life. Most of us have understandably fallen behind in the “bands” we belong to—our Bible study, mom’s group or men’s group, church small group, neighborhood gathering, associations, teams, and more. Somehow spending 7 hours a day with a screen—the American adult’s current average—has not done much for our communities.
 
But it isn’t only the bands that are getting hurt. Not a day goes by without more evidence of isolation’s impact on the human person, especially on our children—from 14-year-olds that play the trumpet like 12-year-olds, to far worse. The past two years have been at best a tough challenge—and at worst, devastating—for our kids: for their friendships, self-esteem, relationships with adults, academic progress, and more.  
 
Confronted with all of this, we need to do more than white-knuckle it and hope for the best. In the second week of the month, we turn to Person & Relationships, Level 2 of our Trinity House. Thankfully, by virtue of being created in the image of God, a Trinity of divine persons—we have already been put on the right path to developing persons and relationships in the most profound way possible, patterned on the inner life of God.

And yet, the surrounding culture is offering us a path that leads to “developing” the natural interplay of person and relationships right out of existence, to put it bluntly. This is our all-too-familiar culture of the “Big Me,” selfies, hyper-individualism, “self-actualization,” relativism, and as one author put it—noting our culture’s drift away from relationships and towards isolation—“bowling alone.”  
 
It seems appropriate that—at a time when we are witnessing such fallout from a mistaken view of the person—the Church gives us the Jan. 13^th feast day of St. Hilary of Poitiers (315-367), one of 36 Doctors of the Church. Driven into exile by Arians (who denied the Trinity), St. Hilary wrote De Trinitate (On the Trinity) and other works to correct the alarming course that was being taken by so many of his fellow Christians.

St. Hilary made a costly personal decision for the Trinity, and in doing so, stood up for our identity as inter-relational, inter-dependent children of God, whose happiness is found not in “bowling alone” or staring at a screen, but in a life of “self-giving” that properly develops both the person and the community.
 
The question for the persons & relationships in our Trinity House is this: Will we go effortlessly with the surrounding culture and put our children on a path that dead-ends in loneliness and despair? Or will we push against the culture—like St. Hilary—in our intentional effort to deepen our children’s true identity in the Trinity?
 
Practically speaking, at our dinner tables, family prayer times, and car rides: 

• Do we model how serving our spouse, family, and others through “self-gift” (modeled on the Trinity) is so much more rewarding than the lonely pursuits of “self-actualization”?
• Do we explain to our children the link between God’s “family of persons” (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) and our own day-to-day life in the “family of persons” in our home, neighborhood, and society?  
• When we watch a movie or hear a news story that idolizes the self-reliant “lone ranger,” dependent on no one, do we initiate a conversation with our children about how that is not what God is calling us to?
• As a family, do we pray to the Most Holy Trinity, deepening our understanding and love for the God who made us in his image?  

Our band director was right. How good it is to play music together! And how good it is—despite being surrounded by a culture that idolizes independence and mocks the loving ties that we experience in the family—to put our kids on a path to healthy personal development and relationships based on the “togetherness” of our identity in the Trinity!
 
“Obtain, O Lord, that I may keep ever faithful to what I have professed in the symbol of my regeneration, when I was baptized in the Father, in the Son, and in the Holy Spirit. That I may worship you, our Father, and with you, your Son; that I may deserve your Holy Spirit, who proceeds from you through your Only Begotten Son.” – St. Hilary, On the Trinity, 12, 57.

Amen!