Good things come in threes: three may be a crowd, but for Christians the fullness of God is not revealed until we invite all three of God's persons into our lives. (testaments).

THE MAILBOX IS ALWAYS STUFFED with catalogs these days. Everybody in consumer America wants to sell us something: clothes, bedding, furniture, kitchenware, books, movies, cosmetics. The catalogs that really confound me are the ones full of what my Mom used to call bric-a-brac. These useless items generally go for under 20 bucks, so it's easy to get sucked into buying one (or two).

They make great gifts, wrapped and shipped for you so all you have to do is supply a credit card number. Apart from gathering dust and taking up surface area in our already crowded homes, they have no real purpose.

I am not immune to the siren call of consumerism, and so I find myself paging through piles of yesterday's catalogs during my morning coffee. Sometimes it's good for a laugh, to see what they think they can sell us now: Nostalgia! Monogrammed furniture! Something for the pet or grandchild! Anything in red, white, and blue!

But occasionally I am surprised by the audacity of these merchants of fluff. This morning while browsing through a sea of trite decorative possessibles, I came upon a group of wall hangings that flabbergasted me. They were carved out of wood, three silhouettes suggestive of a cross, an angel, and a horse-shoe. The idea was that you would buy this arrangement to better your karma in a cold, cruel world.

A cross, an angel, and a horseshoe? Now I've seen everything. At first I was amused, trying to imagine the mind that thought to put these three symbols together in order to hit all the bases of traditional, pop, and secular piety. Pray to your Savior, and if that doesn't work, count on a touch by your New Age angel. And if worse comes to worst, there's always good old-fashioned luck to see you through!

After sharing the joke, however, I felt a wave of annoyance, and finally sadness at the superficiality of the commercial impulse that equates these three signs. And naturally, there is the equally barren consumer impulse that will purchase these three and feel comfortable with the idea that they belong together. The cross, the angel, and the horseshoe may well be the trinity of contemporary religion. We hedge our bets. We worship at many altars. We want to be sure our bases are covered, because it can be a cold, cruel world, and we feel nervous roaming around in it.

What really bothers the believing Christian is the idea that Lady Luck is raised to the par of religious faith--or, conversely, that the Crucifixion is lowered to the irrelevance of a roll of the dice. Angels used to be heavenly beings representing the Godhead. Now they are domesticated spiritual pets that follow us around and protect us from the consequences of our own actions. It's a tough time to be a religious icon when the flag is in the sanctuary, the eucharistic minister is emblazoned with the Nike swoosh, and rock stars are the ones sporting the cross.

As much as it bothers me to consider it, I think there is truth in the idea that a modern trinity is formed by our acceptance of the cross, the angel, and the lucky horseshoe. Our allegiance is split all too evenly between religion, magic, and the gamble of modern living. Yes, we believe in one God. But we also believe in looking out for No. 1--which could be defined as me, myself, and I (another very popular trinity)--or the interests of my family, my race, my country, or even just my tax bracket.

If I've got the angel as my talisman, looking out for No. 1, cleaning up my messes, and keeping the effects of sin off my doorstep, I am less concerned with how the fallout is affecting my neighbor, here or abroad. My angel takes care of me and mine. Hope all is well on your end!

THE HORSESHOE (OR RABBIT'S FOOT, OR LUCKY SOCKS) IS IN some ways more direct and honest. It makes no pretense at piety. It says everything is up to chance, and life means taking risks. You win some, you lose some. If luck can weigh in on your side of the percentages, all the better. If clutching the teddy bear helps you sleep, why do without?

As we consider the implications of this proposed new trinity, we might spend a few moments contemplating the old one by way of comparison. This month we celebrate the solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity. As we delineate it in the sign of the cross, the Trinity symbolically represents the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. These three persons are nonetheless one God. In the history of religious art, the Father has come to be viewed as the one who sits on the throne of heaven. The Son hangs on the cross on earth. The Spirit hovers between, anointing the believer with power that proceeds from the Father and the Son. Taken together, it's an astounding image of who God is.

What do we learn from contemplating the Trinity? God is divine power and authority in the realm of eternity. God also chooses to be human weakness, suffering, and mortality, undergoing the effects of sin even while sinless. Finally, God is the meeting ground between divine power and human powerlessness, an indwelling presence that makes our sojourn in this world a whole lot less lonely.

The ancients may have viewed God as a remote and distant terror to be appeased. The Trinity reveals that God is as close to us as our own flesh and blood.

WE MIGHT THINK OF THE ABOVE DESCRIPTION AS THE nouns of God. There are also the verbs of God to consider: creating, redeeming, sanctifying. We call God creator because we understand God to be the source of all that exists, including our world, our lives, and our future. It's not simply that God was once the creator, but that God still is creating. This is part of God's job description, to make something new. God creates the future from the present, just as the present is a creature fashioned from the past. "Nothing is written," as Lawrence of Arabia once boldly proclaimed, dismissing the idea of a predestined fate. God writes a fresh new word on each page, and we are invited to participate in that writing by the gift of our free will.

Likewise, God did not redeem us once long ago in the past through the compassion of Jesus. Our God is a God who saves, then and now and always. Who needs an angel hanging from the rearview mirror in light of this? We are saved by Jesus, who opened a door through the wood of the cross so that all of us can pass from this life through death to a life that has no end. The forgiveness of Jesus continues to be available to us so that we are rescued from the consequences of sin by a mercy that is unfathomable--literally, that has no depth that can be measured.

Finally, God is in the process of sanctifying the world all the while. The Holy Spirit showed up once rather dramatically on the first Pentecost, accompanied by the special effects of wind and fire and inspired speech. But the business of making the world holy--of unmasking the presence of the sacred in the profane, as we say--is still at work among us. We speak of the "sanctification of the hours" in the work of prayer. The community of faith gathers to consecrate bread and wine so that it becomes for us the Body and Blood of Christ--and so do we in the receiving of it. We receive grace through the reception of sacraments, and we bless each other in countless acts of prayer and self-giving. Little by little, as we share the message of God's love and compassion by making it real for others, we partake in the consecration of the whole world to God's great purposes.

CREATING, REDEEMING, AND SANCTIFYING ARE GOD'S works in the world today as much as in the past. This trinity of action is another facet of the Trinity of persons that makes God known to us. But there is another way to speak of the Trinity that some have found useful: the way of relationship. God has been identified as lover, beloved, and love itself. This idea has its roots in scripture; John's writings tell us that God is love, and that to abide in love is to live in God, as God lives in us (1 John 4:16).

We know from our own experience that love cannot exist in isolation, but rather it strives for expression. A lover is a generative person by definition: he or she generates life, whether physically in procreation or spiritually in acts of charity, kindness, encouragement, and hope. God's activity in the work of creation provides us with a concrete example of how God is the consummate lover of all. God created the world and us in order to have an object for the divine affection. This is what love does, ever striving to give itself away.

If God the creator is the lover, then Jesus is surely the beloved. This is what the voice from heaven pronounced at the Baptism of the Lord, and again at the Transfiguration. Jesus is the beloved, because he mirrors the love of God so perfectly.

Those of us who have experienced the power of love in our own lives know how this goes. You meet someone who seems to meet you in every aspect of your being, as if you are encountering another self. As Adam once shouted in his joy at meeting Eve: "This one, at last, is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh? We feel his pleasure and his relief at finally finding "the one" who can share his life fully, as it was made to be shared.

God is the lover, Jesus is the beloved, and the Spirit is love itself. The Spirit is the force that "proceeds" from the Father and the Son, as if generated by the bond between them. This love is now available to us as a unique presence, establishing a relationship between God and ourselves that is indwelling--no longer separate but essential, part of a shared life. It is impossible to imagine unless we have some knowledge of love, however partial or imperfect. Once we have felt the life of another merge with our own--as lovers, as parent and child, as soul-mated friends, or as mentor and disciple--we can begin to appreciate what it means to add one plus one and still arrive at one.

Can this deeply unified understanding of Trinity ever be replaced by the random arrangements of symbols in our modern trinities? I hope not.

The main difference between pop symbolism and the classic Trinity is that pop spirituality always exists for the individual: me and my Jesus, or me and my angel, or me and my good fortune. But the classic Trinity is much bigger than that: God and creation, all of us together in one all-consuming passion that has no beginning and no end.

Of course it can't be had for under 20 bucks. But even at the cost of everything you've got, it's an absolute bargain.

The Most Holy Trinity: Matthew 28:19

   Walking a Hallway to the Room

   For my father, it was always too long.
   I'd reach the room first,
   holding the door for his arrival,
   others farther down slamming on springs.
   He'd wince along the way,
   eager for the air conditioning,
   water from a plastic cup I'd hand him,
   later, a seat on the balcony
   with its waterway view;
   time to mop his brow and neck, curse Florida.
   Then, the ritual of pipe,
   pouch, dipped felt cleaner,
   multiple strikes of humid-moist matches
   (more curses).

   Two nights,
   I'm staying in Pittsburgh's grandest hotel,
   a place we would never have been together.
   The walk from the elevators to my room
   is far
   not every guest could make it--and
   for him, I think,
   the distance would have been too great.
   Yet, I wait in the threshold for him to catch up.

   --David Masello

ALICE CAMILLE, author of the scripture series Exploring the Sunday Readings and God's Word Is Alive!, both available from Twenty-Third Publications.