The Trinity with Mary

Humanity's experience of the sacred keeps bringing back the feminine sacred - and Church dogma just as endlessly has insisted differently. There seems to have been a particularly strong yearning in recent years for the "face of the goddess," but it seems likely that this same yearning has been just as powerful in past centuries. They called it heresy. Paganism. Idol-worship. (The image of the Virgin Mary is from the Mariavite Sodality, a Texas Catholic group that "includes Marian paths of Gnosis.")

Edward Gibbon in The Decline and Fall Of The Roman Empire, says,

The Christians of the seventh century had insensibly relapsed into a semblance of paganism: their public and private vows were addressed to the relics and images that disgraced the temples of the East: the throne of the Almighty was darkened by the clouds of martyrs, and saints, and angels, the objects of popular veneration; and the Collyridian heretics, who flourished in the fruitful soil of Arabia, invested the Virgin Mary with the name and honours of a goddess. [More on this seventh century "heresy" is at The Chariot.]

That evidently led to the The Qur'an's teaching "And behold! Allah will say: "O Jesus the son of Mary! Didst thou say unto men, 'Take me and my mother for two gods beside Allah'?" He will say: "Glory to Thee! Never could I say what I had no right (to say). Had I said such a thing thou wouldst indeed have known it. Thou knowest what is in my heart, though I know not what in Thine. For Thou knowest in full all that is hidden." (Qur'an 5:116)

Which has in turn led to Christians reacting in horror at the thought that anyone would think that they worship more than one god - and in particular include a feminine god as part of the trinity. After all, the early Christian fathers spent centuries arguing, killing and excommunicating one another over how to explain Christianity as monotheistic - despite the trinity of the father, son, and holy spirit - all of whom were always relentlessly masculine, of course.

And yet even today a Presbyterian website reports, "Muslims and Jews have presumed, as have some Christians, that Christians worship three separate gods. An African Muslim once said that the main difference between his religion and Christianity was that he had several wives and one God, while Christians had one wife and several gods. Muhammad thought Christians believed in three different deities, one of them the goddess Mary, who was impregnated by intercourse with the father God."

There is one essence of God," say the Presbyterians (and the Catholics, Lutherans, Baptists, etc.). "The emphasis is on oneness, not three-ness.The Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God -- but they are one God."

Gotcha.

The Mormans don't buy it.

To Mormons, the Godhead consists of three separate and distinct beings:
* God the Father
* Jesus Christ
* The Holy Ghost

That takes them completely out of the supposedly monotheistic Christian tradition, which hammered out back in the first few centuries after Christ how it was that there could could be 1) the Father, 2) the Son, and 3) the Holy Spirit, and yet the three were one. The Mormans, saying that they're going by the Bible alone, think that's bunk.

In fact, the entire discussion of the trinity from both the Mormon and the Presbyterian links are primary exhibits on how analyzing faith turns it into dogma and strips it of its transcendent power.

One thing that all varieties of Christian dogma have in common, though, is that god is male, whether he's one or three.

For their part Muslims insist that any god more than one male god is too many.

That eliminates, however, the "ah moment" many women - including myself - feel upon testing out these words: Our mother, who art all around me, hallowed be thy name.

There's a rush of rightness there even for an agnostic such as I.