IN 1586 Margaret Clitherow, the daughter of a sheriff of York and a convert to the Church of Rome, was arrested and tried for harbouring Catholic priests. Refusing to plead lest her children were forced to bear witness against her, she was barbarously crushed to death. A quarter of a century earlier, during the reign of Mary Tudor, similar persecution, of Protestants, had occurred, with Archbishop Cranmer and two other bishops being burnt at the stake, along with humbler folk — many of them leather and cloth workers and builders. John Foxe, writing of this persecution in his celebrated Book of Martyrs, gave Protestant Englishmen their own hagiography, and encouraged many generations to think of themselves as an elect nation. These Reformation martyrs on both sides of the religious divide, for all the courage of those who died, represent an intensity of religious and political persecution which is a shameful chapter in Christian history. It is why the unity of the Churches is so important, and why the healing of memories between Churches is an essential part of that journey. We must learn to honour each others’ martyrs.

Two centuries after Clitherow was so brutally killed, a young Jesuit priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins, wrote a poem about her faithfulness unto death, and of how, as he wrote, she had “caught the crying of those Three, The Immortals of the Eternal Ring, The Utterer, Uttered, Uttering, And witness in her place would she”. Her steadfastness and courage was a response to God, the source of all life, who in uttering His living word creates all things, and by His life-giving spirit makes all things new. Our creator is the God who pours Himself out in love, making Himself known to us in the human life and death of Jesus Christ, and overflowing into our lives in His transforming and life-giving spirit. So the Church in speaking of God speaks of God the Holy Trinity. It is this truth and reality of the God who is love in His very being which the Church celebrates this Trinity Sunday. It is, we might say, the pure white light, which focuses the spectrum of colours in which the Christian year, running its course from Advent to Pentecost, celebrates the mystery of salvation.

Because as human beings we are made in the image of the God who is this communion of love, it is open to all of us to “catch the crying of those Three”, or, as another poet, T. S. Eliot puts it, to respond to “the drawing of this love and the voice of this calling”. This response at the heart of our human being, in what we do with our lives, in the work that expresses those lives, and in the relationships which shape them, is properly summed up in terms of vocation — a calling which is, though we may not know it, a response to this deep calling imprinted in who we are.

The Church uses the language of vocation to speak not only of the call to the ordained ministry, but also of the many forms of Christian discipleship. The artist and musician, the teacher and the craftsman, the doctor and the carer, are all at heart about vocation, as are many other professions that are about the realisation and use of the skills we have been given, not selfishly but for the service of others. In a world which strives to regulate and prescribe working patterns in a utilitarian way, vocation of every kind is in danger of being squeezed out. What can be intended to prevent the exploitation of others can make us blind to the necessary vocational response that must be there if as men and women we are to flourish. In that vocational response there is an inescapable sacrificial dimension as we strive to live out the love in whose image we are made. That can be expressed in the nurturing of children, the care of the elderly, the searching for understanding of the scientist, and the commitment to service worked out in a myriad places. Underlying it all is the response to the God who made us in love with restless hearts to find our rest in him.

In Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows the two animals lost in the wild wood hear the piper at the gates of dawn, and exclaim excitedly: “Do you not hear they are playing our music?” On Trinity Sunday we are reminded of the Divine Love which is our music and we are called, like Margaret Clitherow, to catch “the crying of the Three, The Immortals of the Eternal Ring” and find in that communion the heart and goal and calling of our lives.

The Right Rev Geoffrey Rowell is Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe