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| Which One is the Holy Ghost? |
As a follow up to my St. Patrick post the other day and with today being Sunday, I’ll discuss some more Christian folklore – that whole shamrock/Holy Trinity business.
St. Patrick supposedly (there is some dispute as to whether or not he ever did) explained the Holy Trinity by using the shamrock as an example of how three entities can be one. Pat would have been giving this simplified explanation as he converted Ireland from pagans to Christians and drove those snakes out of there, sometime around the 5th century.
However, the concept of triple deities had been around long before Patrick put the shamrock to work as a symbol. Several ancient cultures and mythologies featured triple deities (click here.) In Patrick’s very own pagan Ireland, the Celts worshipped Brigid and her two sisters as a triple goddess (click here.) Thus, Patrick telling them about three Gods in one wasn’t an entirely new concept for them.
Christianity’s officialdom didn’t fully buy into the Trinity business until many years after Christ’s death (click here, scroll to #5.)) As with other Church matters that are difficult to explain away, the Holy Trinity got defined as a “mystery of faith.”
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_mystery_of_faith |
As for my own take on this, I have enough problems understanding and processing the things that the Church does do a good job of trying to explain such as sin and all that Ten Commandments stuff. As for the mysteries of faith there are some, the Resurrection and the Eucharist for instance, that I find myself more inclined to go along with than I do the whole 1=3 and 3=1 Trinity business. St. Patrick’s shamrock analogy notwithstanding, I’ll just leave it that there are a lot holes in that Trinity explanation and maybe that’s why it’s called the “Holy” Trinity. (Sorry, couldn’t resist that.)
But speaking of mysteries, believe or not, as I was typing this, and had the CD player on random selection, this John Mayer tune was the very first one that played. Now that’s a real mystery of faith! Wonder if someone is trying to tell me something?