Journey with Mary
A Sunday Letter, Issue Four
Week of 25 May 2026, The Most Holy Trinity
Dear friends,
This Sunday holds two great feasts in one. The Church looks up to the very heart of God, the Most Holy Trinity, one God in three Persons, an eternal communion of love. And on the same day, by a quiet kindness of the calendar, the young Mother of God sets out into the hill country to visit her cousin Elizabeth.
Two mysteries, one Sunday. One God who is love, and one young woman who shows us what love does when it is given a human heart and a pair of feet.
It is also the closing day of the month of Mary. After thirty-one days of crowning her in our parishes, our gardens and our small house-altars, she takes one last journey with us this Sunday, over the hills of Judah to a doorstep where another mother is waiting for her, and shows us, one more time, how to carry Christ to those who need Him.
Today, the deepest mystery
The Church does not pretend to explain the Most Holy Trinity. She simply tells us, with the apostles and the councils and the saints, what she has been given.
There is one God, eternal and undivided. And within that one being, before there was a world to love, before there was anyone at all, there is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, sharing one life of love forever. The whole created order, including you and me, is the overflow of that love into being. God is not a lonely sovereign. God is not a watcher in the distance. God is, in His very essence, a communion of love.
This is the truth that holds everything else up. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are not three names for one Person, and they are not three gods. They are one God in three Persons, each fully God, each distinct, each known to us by what they have done. The Father has spoken. The Son has come. The Spirit has been given. Each Person carries the whole life of God within Himself, and that life is given to us through Baptism, when we are baptised in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
It is a mystery so far beyond us that no human mind can hold it whole. And yet the Church gives this mystery to every child at the font, every couple at the altar, every mourner at the grave. We speak it every time we make the Sign of the Cross.
Saint Augustine spent nearly twenty years trying to write his great book De Trinitate. He concluded that the only way to know this God was to live as He does, by giving yourself away. That is the bridge to today’s second feast. The Trinity gives itself away eternally. Mary, only just made Mother, gives herself away on the road to the hill country. We are made in the image of the same self-giving God, and so the question this Sunday becomes a very practical one. Whose need is the Lord asking me to go to, with haste?
From the Early Church this week, Saint Irenaeus of Lyon
On Tuesday we sat with Saint Irenaeus, a young man from Smyrna who as a boy had heard Polycarp, who as a boy had heard John, who had laid his head on the breast of Christ. By the time he was Bishop of Lyon, he had spent his life defending the simple truth that the body is good, the world is good, and salvation does not mean escaping creation. It means being made fully alive in it.
Gloria Dei vivens homo. The glory of God is the living human.
Pope Francis declared him a Doctor of the Church in 2022, with the title Doctor unitatis, the Doctor of Unity.
Read this week’s piece on Irenaeus.
From the Desert this week, Saint Moses the Ethiopian
On Friday we sat with Saint Moses the Ethiopian, a remarkable figure of the fourth-century Egyptian desert. He did not come to the monastery of Scetis as a pious novice. He came as a runaway slave who had been the feared leader of a band of robbers in the western delta. Conversion did not soften him in a single moment. It came as slow, patient, painstaking work, the rest of his life spent wrestling honestly with the temper and the memories that did not vanish overnight.
When a young monk once came to him in confusion and asked for a word, Moses gave the answer the desert is famous for.
Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.
Stay still. Stop running. Let God meet you in the quiet. He died around the year 405, killed by a band of raiders he refused to flee.
Mother’s Words to Us, Guadalupe
Yesterday morning we listened to Our Lady of Guadalupe, and the tender words she spoke on a cold hillside in Mexico nearly five hundred years ago, when a frightened Juan Diego was hurrying past, carrying troubles too heavy for him.
Am I not here, I who am your mother? Are you not under my shadow and protection?
She did not take his troubles away in an instant. She reminded him that he was not alone, that he was loved, that his Mother was near. And that was enough.
Read Guadalupe’s Mother’s Words.
Marian Feasts this week, Mother of the Church and the Visitation
This week the Church kept two great Marian feasts.
On Monday 26 May, the Monday after Pentecost, we kept the feast of Mary, Mother of the Church. It is one of the youngest entries in the universal calendar. Pope Francis added it only in 2018. But the truth it carries is as old as the foot of the Cross. As He was dying, the Lord turned to John and said, “Behold your mother.” And from that hour, says the Gospel, the disciple took her into his home. The early Fathers read those words as more than a kindness to one beloved disciple. They saw John as the standing-in for every Christian. The Mother given to him is the Mother given to us all.
The feast falls deliberately on the day after Pentecost because the Church was born when the Spirit descended on the apostles gathered in the Upper Room, and Mary was there with them. Acts tells us so plainly. “All these were of one accord, devoting themselves to prayer, together with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus.” She did not need a new Pentecost. She had received the Spirit at the Annunciation. But she stayed in that room as the Mother of the apostles in their waiting, and as the Mother of the Church in her first hour. To this day she is not only the Mother of the Son. She is the Mother of his Body, the Mother of every Christian baptised into Him.
And then this Sunday, 31 May, the Church keeps the Visitation, the moment Mary herself first carried Christ to someone else. As soon as the angel left her, the Gospel tells us, she set out with haste and travelled through the hill country of Judah to her cousin Elizabeth. She did not stop to ponder her own privilege. She did not wait to be asked. She went, carrying Jesus to the doorstep of a woman who needed her.
At her greeting, Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and cried out the words we still pray every day in the Hail Mary. “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.” The unborn John leapt for joy in his mother’s womb. And Mary sang the Magnificat, that great song that lifts up the lowly and fills the hungry, that makes the proud look small and a peasant girl from Nazareth look impossibly tall in the light of God.
She stayed about three months, until Elizabeth no longer needed her.
Two feasts in one week, and the same Mother in both. On Monday, the Mother given to the whole Church from the Cross. On Sunday, the same Mother going with haste over the hills to serve. Who she is and what she does are one. To be a mother is to go where the love is needed, and to stay until the help is no longer required.
Also this week, Saint Joan of Arc
Today, 30 May, is the feast of Saint Joan of Arc. She was a French farm girl who, at the age of thirteen, began to hear the voices of Saint Michael, Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret asking her to be brave for God and for her country. At seventeen she led an army. At nineteen she gave her life for the faith. The pages of her trial transcript still survive, and they are some of the most moving documents in Christian history.
I am not afraid. I was born to do this.
For our little ones we have added a comic of her life this week, included in Little Light.
From Rome
A quietly extraordinary week from the Vatican.
- Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, a long letter to the whole world calling for artificial intelligence to be “disarmed” and placed at the service of human dignity rather than domination, exclusion, or war. The text runs to 245 paragraphs across five chapters and was deliberately signed on 15 May, the 135th anniversary of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum. The choice places it firmly in the great line of Catholic social teaching that runs through Centesimus Annus and Laudato Si’. Vatican News
- On the Solemnity of Pentecost, the Holy Father preached that the Holy Spirit restores peace between God and humanity through Christ, and that this peace both flows from forgiveness and leads us back toward it. Vatican News
- At Wednesday’s General Audience, Pope Leo reflected on the Second Vatican Council’s Sacrosanctum Concilium, teaching that living tradition and genuine renewal of the liturgy belong together, a tree’s deep roots and its fresh spring branches. He also gently asked priests to respect the norms of the liturgy and not improvise changes to the Mass. Vatican News
- To close the month of Mary, the Holy Father is leading a worldwide Rosary for peace this weekend from the Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes in the Vatican Gardens, each decade dedicated to those wounded by war, with Marian shrines across the world invited to join. Vatican News
This Sunday at Mass
Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity (Year C), and the Feast of the Visitation
- First Reading. Proverbs 8:22-31 (Wisdom singing beside God at the dawn of creation)
- Psalm 8. “O Lord our God, how majestic is your name in all the earth!”
- Second Reading. Romans 5:1-5 (God’s love poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit)
- Gospel. John 16:12-15 (Jesus promising the Spirit who will guide us into all the truth)
For the little ones
A few new things in our Kids’ Corner this week:
- New issue of Little Light: Issue 2 is dedicated to the Most Holy Trinity, with the Visitation, brave Saint Joan of Arc, the courageous Uganda Martyrs, the Pope’s own astronomers at the Vatican Observatory, a Trinity shamrock to make as a family, a Trinity shortbread to bake together, and a tiny prayer to learn by heart, the Glory Be. Read the issue.
- New comic: Saint Joan of Arc, the brave young farm girl of France who heard God’s voice and trusted Him to the end. Her feast is today. Have a look.
- Three new Trinity puzzles: a Holy Trinity crossword, a Holy Trinity word search with twenty-four words across, down and diagonally, and a Holy Trinity maze, all ready to print at home. Open the puzzles hub.
- New short story: a gentle illustrated retelling of Pentecost, perfect for a quiet bedtime read. Read it here.
Until next Sunday, walking with you,
Ivana
journey-with-mary.org
Leave a Reply