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Explaining the Holy Trinity

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Okay, so, God himself  is male, although there doesn’t seem to be a Mrs. God, or even any Girlfriends.  All the same, he has a son, Jesus, who, in spite of his name, is not Hispanic, but Jewish.  The reason for this is that his mother was Jewish, and as we know, descent is reckoned matrilineally in that tradition.

Why his mother was Jewish is rather complicated, but it all goes back to the fact that there aren’t any Goddesses.  There used to be, of course, along with dozens of other Gods, but that was before all the Mergers.  A lack of Planning, no doubt.  At any rate, God needed a son, apparently.  This was because the original people, by finding out the Big Secret, had annoyed him to the point that the only way to fix things was for him to have a son and have people kill him.  It’s not clear who made that rule; you would have thought that would only have annoyed him even more.  But never mind, that was the rule, and there was no squirming out of it.

So there’s God, needing a son, and no obvious way to get one.  Except, of course, being God, he could have just created one on the spot.  Or he could have just said, “Forget it, that Adam and Eve thing was so long ago, who even remembers?”  But of course there was the rule.  Maybe God has a Mom we don’t know about?

But I digress.  What to do?  Well, humans had beaucoup females.  A bit kinky, but well within divine tradition, and after all, the whole issue was their fault.  Of course, she would have to be a virgin.  I mean.  And it would be way cool if she could stay a virgin through the whole thing.

God was living in the Levant in those days, and found a suitable girl, Mary, in no time.  The permanent virgin thing was trickier.  Enter the Holy Ghost.

I’m not saying that all of the above has been a paragon of clarity, but this is where things get a bit fuzzy.  See,  in spite of being the Holy Ghost, he’s not a former Holy Live Person, as you might expect.  To complicate things even more, it’s not clear exactly what he is.  I say he, but even that’s not clear.  Sometimes he’s a dove, sometimes, especially when he’s making religious people spout gibberish, he’s, like, fire.  Not like a house fire, more like a little Bic fire, sprouting from their heads.  With regard to the whole Mary thing, you often see him in paintings as a dove, but I’m going with the Bic; more consistent with permanent virgincy, don’t you think?

So.  That’s your Holy Trinity: God, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost.  Mary doesn’t count, as she’s a she, and everybody agrees nowadays that persons of that persuasion don’t have sufficient gravitas.  They have obviously not met any nuns.  Ditto for the possible Holy Mom.  This may leave you wondering, who is Jesus’ real Dad, God or the Holy Ghost?  It also brings up the whole issue of the Holy Ghost’s rank, so to speak.  Is he a Brother, an Uncle, a Pet?  Or if they are all the same person, as people claim, how does that make any sense?  As it happens, I have had the privilege of twelve years of Roman Catholic education, from kindergarten through high school, under the tutelage of first the fine Sisters of Providence, and then the Franciscans.  I am highly qualified to give you the best answer from the highest authority.

It’s a mystery.  Shut up.

What I think I believe: A prose poem

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To say there is no duality is to concede there is.

To say God has a list is ignorance.

To say you know anything for sure is naive.

To believe in a separate, personal God is nothing short of ridiculous.

Every religion tells us that God is immutable, omnipotent, and utterly ungraspable by the human mind.  Every religion goes on to tell us exactly what is in the mind of God.

Do you think your one, holy, catholic and apostolic church has droned the same immutable message since it rose from the ashes of the Roman Empire?  Do you really believe your free-thinking, free-wheeling nihilistic Buddha is the same one who sat, perplexed, tormented and impatient under the Bodhi tree?  Can it be your quibbling, etymological Yaweh is the same brutal partisan of the Torah?  Is your pitiless prophet the same one who forgave the Meccans for trying to destroy him?

Congratulations, you have mastered the difficult art of intransigent gullibility.  Nothing is changeless, not even the divine genealogies your ancestors would find disturbing without their context.

Yes, there is a God, created and lovingly maintained by his human masters.  How could it be the opposite?  Does God shave?  What does he eat?  What use would he have of testicles?  Where does he get his clothes?  How can he have demands?

In my universe, there is no god but All.  There are no demands, no rewards, no punishment.  Leave that kind of stuff for humanity.  The meaning of life is life.  The meaning of death is life.  The meaning of humanity is arrogance.  The meaning of good is evil.  The meaning of my right hand is my left hand.

How can it be otherwise?

Life on the Mississippi

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In a dusty, fading memory of a National Geographic of my youth, among the bare-breasted African ladies and stripe-shirted Parisians, there is a sunny picture of a lad on a raft, his toes swirling the Mississippi River.  His father had taken him out of school for a year of rafting on that mythic Father of Dreams, if not waters.  Why could not I have a father like that, I grieved.

My own father thought peace, not adventure, was the greatest gift.  He was born and grew in Latvia, in a forest of kin, as much a part of his place as the oak trees planted for the native sons.  A small stone house, a well, three oaks and a horizon of fields.  A burial ground nearby sheltered his ancestors on both sides; their names are gone now, weathered away like the wooden crosses that marked their graves.  But he was there, where he belonged, in the embrace of family, living and dead.

When I was a boy, I would stand in front of the door of my house, looking outside, wishing and wondering.  I think he was like that.  Bye and bye, whatever was beyond the fields of oats and rye beckoned, and he answered.  In a fit of irrational exuberance, he joined the army.

Not bad, really, at least at first.  It was a free country, for that brief period between the great wars, and nothing for soldiers to do but dream of dying under foreign skies, all brave and noble.  They certainly had the songs for it.  He went off to Riga, to the War College.  It was a blast.  Bright lights, big city, no way to keep him down on the farm after that.  He married a girl with an eighth grade education and a mind that was quicker than a hare chased by two foxes and an alley cat.  No slouch himself, he thought she was normal.  They had a couple of children.  You know that feeling, in a dream, when you’ve climbed to the highest peak to look at the world, and you turn around to discover the mountain has disappeared while you weren’t paying attention?

Russians.  Germans, then Russians again.  The world was in one of its fits.  This part of the story is a haze of half glimpsed hopes and fears, mostly projections on my part.  Like one of those stunts on a magician’s stage : a loud noise, a lot of smoke, and when it all clears, everything is different.    In a camp in Germany, full of shattered dreams, I was born, much to the chagrin, I’m betting, of my brothers.

The father I knew had had enough adventures, thank you.  He had made some promises to God when all else had crumbled; he did his best to see that his children fulfilled them.  Keep this in mind when you promise things to God: don’t involve others.  Faust probably had a better deal.

These days, I live near the Mississippi, and occasionally, when I drive upriver, I see that kid on the raft in my mind.  I’m older now than my father ever got.  I hope I’ve done as well as he did.

Lizards and the English

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Let’s say you’re an Englishman, and from a long line of them.  As far back as you can reckon, your ancestors, on both sides, were from England.  None of this mucking about in Scotland or other foreign parts  One of your ancestors was there to greet the Angles when they arrived.  Another shoved his pike up poor Richard’s bum at the Battle of Bosworth.  You speak the Queen’s language, drive on the left side of the road, and you think Majorca is too damned hot, Brighton is fine, thanks.  In other words, you are bloody well English.

Another guy is decidedly not. He’s from Tiko-Schmiko somewhere south of the Solomans.  Not only are all his ancestors also from there, but no one has ever been known to leave there.  He worships crabs, and pours lizard piss on sacred stones to make it rain.  In short, he is a typical Tiko-Schmikian.

“Holy cow!” you say (your religion is sometimes amusing), “we are so different, I cannot even grasp the magnitude of the difference!”

Indeed.  In what sense are you so different, then?  Not genetically; you are probably about 99.9% the same genetically.  Of course, you’re about 60% the same as a chicken, but we’ll leave that aside for now.  Culturally, then?  After all, it’s not what you’re born with, but what you do, dammit!  England has art, religion, music, the conservative party.  What have they got down there in god-forsaken Tiko-Schmiko, for Chrissake?

Well, they have art, religion, music, and .. well, okay, not the conservative party.  They do have a rather prissy old fart, though, who’s always ranting about how the kids these days don’t know lizard piss from lemonade.

The English, at least, do know that.