Even though you’ve probably settled on your 2024 New Year’s resolutions by now, we’d like to invite you to consider one more—a resolution aimed at elevating your engagement with the things of this world, thereby strengthening your relationships and bringing fulfillment and peace to your soul. Call it your Trinity House New Year’s challenge.
 
But first, a few words of background. As you may know, the Trinity House ministry is inspired by these 25 words in the Catechism: “The Christian family is a communion of persons, a sign and image of the communion of the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit” (2205). In just a few words, we glimpse the phenomenal connection between the family and the Trinity. And quite simply, that connection comes down to communion.
 
We are made for communion, defined in part as “intimate fellowship” (Miriam-Webster). In a way, we don’t need to learn communion. We’re already hard-wired for it. But in a way, we do. We need to learn that communion can only be had with persons. Trying to give ourselves—through our minds and bodies—to work, activities, or things without deeper reference to the “why” of persons leaves our souls without sustenance, without fulfillment, without peace.

We don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say that herein lies the source of all human struggle and pain. Instead of communing with the “communion of persons”—the Most Holy Trinity—through the Eucharist, other sacraments, and prayer, we too often settle for “intimate fellowship” with lesser things and thus remain separated, to some degree, from God and our loved ones.
 
We all do this all the time. We choose “communion” with our phones over presence with our spouse, children, friends, neighbors, or colleagues. We choose “communion” with work or unnecessary activity over communion with God and intimate fellowship with our family. We choose “communion” with anxiety, crisis, and drama over communion with Christ’s peace, rest, and Sabbath.

None of this is to say that we shouldn’t focus on our work, activities, or hobbies. We should, but we should focus on them while in communion with God, allowing his presence to our souls to inform, guide, uplift, and limit our engagement with things. Our engagement with the world should always take place in the context of an intimate abiding and communing with the Holy Trinity and other people.

Without communion with God and others as the heart and conscience of our engagement with the things of the world, our families start to look less like a “sign and image” of God’s communion of persons and more like a “sign and image” of the world’s loneliness, isolation, and turmoil. After all, attempting to give ourselves in intimate fellowship with things and activities is far, far below the beatific state of loving, interpersonal communion for which we were made.
 
So can we say, “No more! Not this year!”? The turning of the New Year always brings that special sense of potential, aspiration, and dreams. This year can be different. And yes, the caliber of communion within our souls and our families can be deeper, stronger, and more reflective of the Trinity’s own communion.
 
Before we share the resolution, here are three practical questions that can help you hone and strengthen your current resolutions:

• Do my top resolutions of 2024 aim at strengthening my communion with God?  
• After my communion with God, do my most important resolutions this year aim at strengthening my communion with my spouse, children, parents, and the other vital relationships God has given me?
• Do any of my current resolutions distract and diminish me because they aim more at communion with “lesser ends” and things?

With these diagnostic questions in mind, here is a proposed resolution for you to consider, based on the 5 levels of your Trinity House:

• I resolve to receive God’s communion in my soul, to deepen this communion in my marriage, family, and key relationships, to care for this communion in our household economy, to celebrate this communion in our family culture, to share this communion with others through hospitality and service, and to lead my family members to do the same.

The Gospel reading on last Sunday’s Epiphany of the Lord drove this resolution home powerfully for us. After the Magi have encountered the infant Son of God, we read that “they departed for their country by another way.”

By another way. This year, instead of going back the same way to communion with lesser things, may we choose “another way”…the beautiful and life-giving way of authentic communion.