Day 14: The Holy Trinity—Christianity’s “Big Three”

Last month, when I was still feeling healthy and motivated—before “the plague”—we talked about the Big Three of the Hindu pantheon: Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. The Hindu triad represents three forms of the divine that are all part of one absolute God.

Christianity has its own “Big Three,” the Holy Trinity. Although Christians are always careful to emphasize that there is only one God, Catholics and most other Christians still recognize three different aspects of that one God—the Father, the Son (Jesus Christ), and the Holy Spirit.

God the Father is kind of like Brahma—he’s the Creator, the one who made the universe and everything in it out of some formless void. Despite the fact that popular depictions often show God the Father as a wise old man seated on some shiny throne in a heaven full of puffy clouds, there’s really no way of telling exactly what he looks like, or even if he’s male. The Book of Genesis says that God created man in his own image, but that’s pretty vague, if you ask me. Compared to, say, a duck-billed platypus, a female human is pretty damn close to the popular image of God as an old man. (In fact, most Christian denominations say that God has no gender—he/she is just God, and that’s all there is to it.) So, for the sake of simplicity, let’s just say he’s kind of an angry old guy who watches over things—that’s God the Father.

God the Son—i.e., Jesus Christ—is, in a way, a bit like Hinduism’s Vishnu, the Preserver. According to Christianity, things had gotten so bad on Earth that God the Father decided to send his son—who was simultaneously a real human being and also completely divine, one of the great inexplicable mysteries of Christian belief—to save us all from sin and eternal damnation.

In other words, Jesus came in order to "preserve" humanity and bring us salvation. Jesus Christ is (obviously) the focal point for Christians and the aspect of God that makes Christianity unique among other religions. For that reason, we'll move on for today and talk more about Jesus another time. Trust me, he'll get plenty of attention now that I'm starting to feel better.

The third member of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, is probably the most difficult to comprehend—and in a group that includes a Father who is formed like humans but also formless and a Son who’s both all God and all human, that’s saying a lot.

I went to CCD for 9 years and I couldn’t really tell you exactly what the Holy Spirit is. (Of course, I went to CCD for 9 years and even taught it for one year, and up until a few minutes ago, when I Googled it, I couldn’t have told you that CCD stands for “Confraternity of Christian Doctrine,” so I may not be the greatest source.)

The Holy Spirit is often depicted as a dove—for example, the dove that came down to Jesus when he was baptized. But essentially, the Holy Spirit has no permanent form. It’s . . . well . . . spirit.

Unlike the third part of the Hindu triad, Shiva, however, the Holy Spirit doesn’t serve the role of “Destroyer.” In fact, the Holy Spirit is viewed as the Giver of Live, and is frequently considered an eternal divine force that existed before the universe was created.

The Holy Spirit is, sort of, the one who gets things done. It goes around giving power to those who need it and putting necessary steps in motion. For instance, the Holy Spirit was the one who made it possible for Jesus’s mother, the Virgin Mary, to conceive him without a human man. The Holy Spirit is, in my mind, kind of like the puppet master—working behind the scenes, but ultimately responsible for putting on the show.

So, yeah. It’s a little confusing. There are three aspects of God, but they don’t necessarily have distinct roles. There’s overlap and enigma and things just aren’t crystal-clear like they are in Hinduism. But the mystery is part of Christianity. Most Christians believe we can’t ever fully understand the precise form or nature of God. And we shouldn’t understand. We have to accept God on faith—that’s the whole point.

Me? I like clarity. Maybe that’s why I’ve always had so much trouble being Christian, both in the past and over the past two weeks. But I’ll keep trying.

Day 13: Redemption?

I’m kind of afraid to jinx it, but I think the “plague” I’ve been suffering may be starting to pass. I’m still sick, still weak, but I’m slowly beginning to feel like there might be life after this illness.

I’d like to be able to tell you that it was a miracle—that I prayed like a good Christian and my prayers were answered. But that’s not what happened.

When I first got sick, my prayers for relief were sincere. I asked God to help me feel better, and I think I even believed there would be a divine intervention—that God would reach down from heaven, lift the illness, and reward me for my good behavior.

Not so much. After several days of getting sicker and sicker, despite my pleas for divine help, I started to lose whatever trace of faith I might have had left. I kept praying, but I felt myself going through the motions. The prayers were no longer backed by any feeling or even hope. They were just words.

I kept reading the Bible, but instead of seeing it as a holy book, I found myself resenting God’s cruelty and seemingly unjustified anger over what appear to me to be minor infractions. I hate to say it, but I started to dislike God—at least the God of Christianity, who was letting me down.

I started to think I should abandon this project entirely. I was too sick to do research, too sick to write, too sick to care about religion or truth or anything other than the dim possibility that I might start feeling better someday.

But even at the worst moments, when I couldn’t stop coughing long enough to take a breath and thought that I might actually not survive this sickness (okay, I may be a bit overdramatic), I still had faith—in myself. Even when I don’t trust God, or even fully believe that God exists, I have faith in myself. I do what I say I’ll do. In a world where you can’t rely on anyone, I’ve always prided myself on the fact that you can rely on me.

So I have to finish this project for myself, even if no one else cares. I have to pick up my aching body and my exhausted mind and go back to work—even if it kills me. I’ll make my own miracle if I have to.

Then again, there’s always the possibility that God did help me. Maybe God is just a little slow when it comes to answering my prayers. Maybe this painfully slow recovery really is divine intervention. And, since I have no way to be sure, I’ll do what every good Christian should do: accept it on faith and give thanks to God for his mercy and kindness.

So, in that spirit, I’ll leave you with a quote from Psalm 92:

“It is good to give thanks to the Lord

And to sing praises to Your name, O Most High;

To declare Your lovingkindness in the morning

And Your faithfulness by night,

With the ten-stringed lute and with the harp,

With resounding music upon the lyre,

For You, O Lord, have made me glad by what You have done,

I will sing for joy at the works of Your hands. . . .”

So, thanks, God. Now, I’ve got work to do.

Day 10: The Book of Job

I’m still sick, so I know I haven’t been posting as often or as well as I should be, but I’m mainly just trying to survive at this point. Coincidentally, I just finished reading the book of Job in my quest to make it through the entire Bible this month, and I couldn’t help but draw a few parallels to my current situation.

So you’ve got this guy Job and he has it all—a big family, nice home, lots of livestock—pretty much everything a God-fearing guy from the land of Uz could ever want.

Job’s a stand-up guy, too. He’s not one of those sleazebags who made his fortune screwing other people over. He’s a good person: “blameless, upright, fearing God and turning away from evil.” (Job 1:1) God is happy with Job, and that’s why Job is doing so well.

But you never can tell what God is going to do. Despite the fact that Job’s pretty much a model biblical citizen, when Satan challenges God, saying that Job will turn against Him if God takes away all the things that make Job’s life so easy, God jumps right in and uses Job as a divine guinea pig.

God lets Satan do whatever he wants to Job, as long as he doesn’t kill Job. So Satan goes to work, manipulating things. First, Job’s animals get stolen, and then his family members are tragically killed. But still, Job keeps his faith in God, saying, “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” (Job 1:21)

Since killing off all Job’s livestock and loved ones didn’t do the trick, Satan goes to the next level and starts attacking Job himself, giving him painful boils all over his body. Job isn’t too happy about it. He complains a lot, and keeps whining to his buddies about how unfair it is that he’s being punished even though he’s always been a good man. Still, he refuses to curse God, the way Satan thought he would. He keeps believing that God will eventually deliver him from the pain and suffering, saying things like “Though He slay me, I will hope in Him.” (Job 13:15)

Job feels humiliated by what has happened to him. He knows he’s a righteous person, but he’s being treated the way a terrible sinner should be treated. He keeps calling out to God, asking for some explanation (and some relief). He says, “Days of affliction have seized me. . . . I cry out to You for help, but You do not answer me; I stand up, and You turn Your attention against me. You have become cruel to me; With the might of Your hand You persecute me.” (Job 30:16–21)

Finally, God comes and says that Job shouldn’t be questioning His motives and actions, but because Job never turned away from his faith, he is rewarded. At the end of the story, we find out that “The Lord restored the fortunes of Job . . . and the Lord increased all that Job had twofold.” (What’s strangest to me about this part of the story is that Job gets a new set of seven sons and three daughters to replace the ones who died, which is all well and good for Job, but it would kind of suck to be one of the original, now dead children, don’t you think?)

Anyway, I’ve always hated the story of Job. It’s just one of many bizarre examples in the Bible of what seems to be God’s arbitrary cruelty. And I think I’m even more bothered by the whole idea of a good person suffering for no good reason right now because I’m kind of in a similar situation.

A few years ago, I was a little bit like Job. I had a great job, I made good money, I was married (okay, so I didn’t really like the guy, but that’s not the point of my story), and I had a cute house in a nice neighborhood. It wasn’t a bad life.

I won’t try and tell you that I’ve ever been “blameless” or “upright” like Job was, but really, I’m not a horrible person. I put money in the Salvation Army volunteer’s bucket at Christmastime, I clean up my dogs’ poop when I walk them, and I do my best to be nice to people, even when they’re being bastards who deserve a smart-ass response. So I always thought God was happy enough with me.

But over the past couple of years, I’ve been going through some trials that would probably make even Job get pretty pissed off. My great job ended when my company got bought out and moved to another state, so I’ve been living as the insecure existence of a freelancer ever since. Then I got divorced. Then the economy tanked and work became even more unsteady than usual, which made the cute house in the nice neighborhood way too expensive. And now, I’ve got this sickness that just won’t go away. Okay, so I haven’t reached the full-on boils all over the body stage just yet, but it’s still pretty awful.

So what do I do? Suffer in silence? Whine and bitch to my friends, like Job? Do I shake my fists and demand an explanation from God? The Bible says the answer is to trust in God, to believe that everything will work out in the end, if I really am a righteous person who deserves all the good fortune I had and then lost.

I wish it were that easy, but obviously, if my faith in God were all that strong, I wouldn’t be conducting this crazy year-long experiment to begin with.

So I’ll just try to suffer in silence (okay, maybe with a little bit of bitching to my friends), try to stay alive, and keep reading the Bible and trying to find some faith. Maybe God and Satan will stop playing around with me and I’ll have my fortunes restored, just like Job.

Day 8: The Seven Sacraments

My sickness—a.k.a. “the plague”—hasn’t gone away. In fact, it seems to be getting a little bit worse each day, to the point where I’m starting to wonder if I should be calling in a priest to administer last rites. And that got me thinking that I should talk a little about the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church.

The first sacrament is baptism, where a newborn baby is officially welcomed into the world as a member of the Church. I had my own baptism on April 15—tax day here in the United States—which seems rather appropriate, given how unpleasant things later turned out between me and the Church. My only real problem with the notion of baptism is that I was too young to decide for myself whether I wanted to be part of the Catholic Church—which is why certain denominations of Christianity have adult baptism instead, to allow people to choose for themselves. But we’ll get to that later (after the plague has passed, I hope).

The second sacrament people usually make is penance, or confession, where you tell a priest all the sins you’ve committed and he forgives you on God’s behalf, after telling you to say prayers or do other things to make up for your behavior. Back in the olden days, when I went through penance for the first time, we did it old school: in the little confessional booth where a special screen separated you from the priest to whom you were detailing your sins. Nowadays, a lot of churches do confessions face to face, with just you and the priest sitting together in a room, having a conversation. Yuck. No thanks. I made confession face to face once, and let’s just say that was my last confession. It’s creepy enough to tell some guy all the bad things you’ve done. A little bit of anonymity is the least the Church can offer to make the experience more tolerable. But I guess that’s the whole point: to make you really suffer for your sins.

The third sacrament is the Eucharist, or Holy Communion, where you take the bread and wine (which, through the miracle of transubstantiation, Catholics believe, becomes the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ). I had my First Communion in third grade. They made us dress up like miniature brides, with white frilly dresses and veils on our heads. I wish I had my family photo album with me so I could scan and post a picture. I looked like a complete dork. Personally, I think the boys should have had to wear tuxes and top hats so they would look as stupid as we girls did, but they got off easy—just regular suits. We all looked ridiculous, but just like with confession, I guess that’s part of the process—it is, after all, a rite of passage.

The next sacrament is confirmation. This is where you become an “adult” member of the Catholic Church. I was 14 when I made mine, and I was oh so mature. I guess you could compare confirmation to the bar or bat mitzvah that Jewish kids go through—but rarely is a confirmation anywhere near as elaborate, at least where I come from. You go through the ceremony, pick your “adult” name (a saint’s name that gets added after your middle name—mine is Rose, after my grandmother), and then maybe you have a little party to celebrate. For mine, I got a string of freshwater pearls and dinner with my immediate family at the local Italian restaurant. Not exactly a huge event, but then, my mom isn’t even Catholic, so I don’t blame her for not wanting to throw a big old bash.

The next two sacraments—marriage and holy orders (becoming a member of the clergy)—are supposed to be about choosing what you want to do with your life (because, apparently, there are only two choices for good Catholics: get married or become a priest or nun). I did get married in a Catholic Church, so I technically went through the sacrament of marriage. I guess I didn’t do very well with that one. Too bad divorce isn’t a sacrament as well, because I rocked that rite of passage! So I’ve been through five of the seven sacraments. And since it’s looking doubtful at this stage that I’ll ever choose to become a nun, I guess I’ll never get to take holy orders.

That means I only have one sacrament left to go through, the one that got me thinking about all this to begin with: the anointing of the sick (or last rites). This one is where a priest visits a deathly ill person, anoints him or her with holy oil, and forgives any sins to help prepare the person for imminent death. With the way I’ve been feeling the last few days, this sacrament seems a little too close for comfort. Since I only have a couple more days to go as a Catholic, please—pray for me. I’d like to get out of this without participating in last rites.

Day 5: The Rosary

I didn’t make it to Mass this morning. I was still coughing too hard and I didn’t want to be that annoying person I remember from my childhood—the one hacking and snarfling in the back of the church, disrupting the solemnity of the ceremony, and the one you hated the next day when you woke up coughing yourself.

So I did the next best thing for a good Catholic—I sat down and prayed a rosary. I used to have a beautiful hand-carved wooden rosary that my grandmother gave me. It was made in Rome and was (so she claimed) blessed by the Pope himself. I doubt that was true, but it was pretty nonetheless. Of course, I couldn’t find it, so I had to make my own rosary.

A few years ago, when I quit smoking, I took up beading to have something to keep me busy so I wouldn’t cave in when the cravings for nicotine hit. I never got good at it, but I can still string beads well enough to create a rudimentary rosary (see photo below). It may not be blessed by the Holy Father, but it gets the job done.

Now, I haven’t prayed a rosary in a long time. And although I remembered that it involved the Lord’s Prayer and lots of Hail Marys, I was pretty lost. Luckily, I was able to find the ancient prayer book that I received back when I made my First Communion. It came in a little white patent leather purse—quite stylish, I must say. The purse is long gone, but I still have the book, for some reason (see picture below). And it gave me the instructions I needed to say the rosary.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t too horrible an experience. Although I still find it a bit awkward to pray the same old tired prayers that I learned as a toddler, I picked it up pretty quickly and got my momentum. And I even kind of liked it.

There’s something soothing about reciting the same prayers over and over while working your way along a string of beads. It makes the rest of the world and its distractions go away for a little while. And, unlike my attempts at meditation, saying the rosary gave me something a little more concrete to focus on, so I was better able to stay on track.

I also liked the memories that came up as I held the beads and said the prayers. I remembered sitting on my bed with my grandmother as she taught me to say the Our Father and showed me how to work the rosary beads. We went through that little white prayer book together, and she explained it all to me in her charming Polish accent that I still hear in the back of my mind whenever I order kielbasa.

And I remembered how safe I felt on those nights when my grandmother babysat me and my sister while my parents went out to dinner or bowling. She would sit on a bench at the foot of our beds and murmur her prayers (always in Polish), saying rosary after rosary until we fell asleep.

That feeling of comfort and safety, I guess, is what most Christians are looking for in their religious experience. I’m glad I was able to recapture it, if only for a moment.

Day 4: Being a Christian

I know I haven’t posted in a while, but I swear, it’s not just because I’m lazy. While I’ve been reading the Bible as part of my research this month, I’ve been going through some pseudo-biblical experiences of my own.

First, I started off the month by making my very own Exodus, trekking from Pennsylvania to Texas, where I’ll be living for the next few months. While driving through Tennessee, we encountered some heavy-duty storms that made me wonder if the Apocalypse was coming.

Then, we arrived, and I immediately came down with an awful illness that all of us who have it are referring to as “the plague.” Although I haven't broken out with boils (at least not yet), between the headache, sore throat, sneezing, and coughing, I’m kind of proud that I’m still alive at all, so please, don’t beat me up too much for taking so long to write—and for writing such a crappy post on top of it.

Right now, I’m mainly focused on getting myself healthy again, but while I’m lying around waiting for enough time to pass so I can pop a few more Advil Cold and Sinus pills, I’m doing my best to figure out how to be a Christian again.

Like I said, I’ve been reading the Bible. And wow—it’s even more boring than I remembered.

And the boringness isn’t even the real problem. I’m finding it very hard to read as a “Christian” and not as an “editor.” I can’t seem to stop myself from picking out the bizarre inconsistencies and omissions. I mean, seriously, I would never have let this book go to the printer without some serious revisions by the authors!

I’m doing other things besides reading the Bible, too. I’ve started saying prayers at night and in the morning, like I used to do back in the Dark Ages, when I was still a good little Catholic girl.

It’s strange, though. Being Christian means incorporating not just a faceless “God” into your prayers—it means talking to Jesus, too. And, given the fact that I pretty much decided I didn’t think Jesus was divine many years ago, praying to him now is a bit disconcerting. It kind of feels like declaring yourself a virgin after you’ve already had sex. It ain’t true, but you can pretend if you want to. Hey, I’m doing my best here. Cut me some slack. I'm sick.

I’m supposed to go to church tomorrow morning (assuming I’m not still sick and hacking up a lung), which would be my first church experience, outside of weddings and funerals, in close to 20 years. In a way, I’m kind of looking forward to it, and something tells me that church down here in Texas will be a little bit more fun than what I remember. I certainly hope so.

Day 1: Christianity Revisited

It’s December 1, and today I am a Christian.

Okay, so technically, I started out life as a Christian, so this isn’t exactly a news flash. And I have to admit that my motives for being Christian this month are somewhat selfish—I wanted to have Christmas. Yes, I know—I’m no better than a 6-year-old child. Hey, I never claimed to be mature.

But this time, I’m going to look at Christianity differently. Instead of just blindly accepting what I’m told, I’m going to delve deeper and try to understand what Christians really believe and why. 

I was raised Catholic, so I know a little bit about that already, but I’ll still spend some time trying to revisit Catholicism—and maybe trying to figure out what exactly made me leave the Church in the first place.

But I won’t stop there. I’m going to explore other forms of Christianity, from Eastern Orthodox to various Protestant denominations. I’ll go to church, even if the boredom kills me. And I’m going to read the Bible cover to cover, something I tried to do once as a child (although I gave up somewhere along the way because all the “begats” were making me want to claw my eyes out).

This month may seem like it won’t be much of a journey into the unknown, but, in some ways, Christianity feels more foreign to me than faiths like Hinduism or Shinto. I recognize that I have my own selfish biases against certain aspects of Christianity, so I’m going to do my best to be objective and not to let my personal experiences of the past cloud my experience in the present. We’ll see what happens.