Conversations with Christine
Conversations with Christine, Chapter 7: Trinities
A long time passed before Christine and I were together again. While Brett and I traveled the United States in our Westfalia campervan, Christine was completing her master’s in theology at Seattle University.
Upon returning to the Pacific Northwest, Brett and I settled in the small Victorian seaside art community of Port Townsend, Washington. Housing in the historic Uptown neighborhood was tight, and we were discouraged from imagining Uptown Port Townsend as our new home.
Instead of using a real estate agent, we printed flyers featuring a photo of us and canvassed the entire historic Uptown area on foot. Within a week we had been contacted by several sellers, and we made an offer on a 1,100-square-foot modern cottage within walking distance of the Carnegie Library and co-op. Brett and I set about making simple, aesthetic changes that soon made the house our home.
Christine traveled to Port Townsend to visit us several times before Brett and I had children. Like her visits in Seattle and Sitka, we connected over great meals and long walks, both of us exploring entirely new landscapes of our internal and external lives.
“Christine, there is a belief in Hindu culture that I’m trying to understand. I keep wondering how it parallels Western beliefs,” I said as we approached Chetzemoka Park. I was leading us to a scenic beach walk along Admiralty Inlet, where the Strait of Juan de Fuca flows into Puget Sound.
“You have often used the term unus mundus—one world—to connect world religions, but I can’t see how the belief system of Hindu culture in the East connects to Christianity in the West.”
“Are you comparing the Hindu trinity, the Trimurti, to the Christian Trinity?” she asked.
“I don’t know if I’m comparing,” I replied, “but I am trying to figure out how they are all connected. Within the Trimurti, there are three gods: Brahma, the creator, Vishnu, the preserver, and Shiva, the destroyer.”
I had stopped to face her while I made the shape of a triangle with my hands. I then used my index finger to create a circle around that triangle.
“Encompassing the Trimurti is a Supreme Divine Being with no shape, gender, or personality, pure consciousness itself.”
“You once quoted a theologian and philosopher to me in a way that made sense.” I stopped to take off my backpack and pulled out my journal. Like my sister, I had grown attached to using composition notebooks and I had various sticky notes jutting out from the pages. I flipped quickly to what I was looking for.
“It was a quote from Paul Tillich, an influential theologian and philosopher from the 20th century. He had written: ‘The being of God is being-itself. The being of God cannot be understood as the existence of a being alongside others or above others.’ I’m assuming this is similar to what Hindus refer to as Brahman and, within Christian traditions, the Godhead. This being is the circle that encompasses the triangle. Is that correct?”
Christine helped me put on my backpack, tucked in my journal, and zipped it up. “Yes,” she responded. “That is my understanding of Brahman and the Godhead.”
We had made our way through the park and reached the ocean. We paused a moment to take in the view. The sun glittered off the water as the Washington State Ferry passed in the distance.
“Let’s head left toward Fort Worden and the lighthouse. It will take over an hour to loop back to my house from there,” I suggested.
As we started to make our way across the rock-covered beach, Christine encouraged me to continue. “I’m tracking you so far.”
I paused for a moment, trying to gather my thoughts. “If I were to parallel these trinities, would God be the creator, Jesus the preserver and the Holy Spirit the destroyer?”
“In both of these trinities, all three aspects are part of Brahman and the Godhead. It is confusing when you dump all of these concepts out on the table and try to see the patterns within all of them, which is what I think you are attempting to do,” Christine responded. “These are all systems. Just different words, different cultures, different minds shedding light on the same subject matter throughout history. Whether it is the Hindu Trimurti, the Christian Trinity, G. I. Gurdjieff’s Law of Three, C. G. Jung’s transcendent function, or Aristotle’s Golden Mean, they are trying to get us to the same place. I think what you are trying to see is the Universal Cosmic Truth among all of these collective belief systems. Is that correct?”
She stopped as we approached the sandy shoreline of what people in Port Townsend call the locals’ beach.
She grabbed a piece of driftwood with a sharp point and started drawing a triangle in the sand. At the top of the triangle, she wrote “Force 1.” On the bottom right, she wrote “Force 2,” and on the bottom left, “Force 3.” Around the triangle, she drew a circle.
As she finished her drawing, she turned to me and said, “All of these belief systems you keep talking about use this exact same triangle to help us move beyond dualistic thinking and opposites.”
“What is dualistic thinking and how does that relate to the trinities that we are talking about?” I asked, trying really hard not to let my confusion show on my face.
“I like the Jungian analyst Robert Johnson’s perspective on what dualism is. He describes it as the literal birth of the human ego. When we are born, we can remember where we have come from. We can remember that we are a finite part of the infinite.” She pointed her stick to the circle enclosing the triangle and then to Force 1. “But as we age, we forget. We start taking on the views and beliefs of those around us, and our world is split in two.” She then pointed to Forces 2 and 3 at the bottom of the triangle. “We start living in a dualistic world of good and evil, the world of opposites and paradoxes.”
Christine paused as she looked down at the triangle she had drawn in the sand. She then looked up at me, squinting against the glare of the sun on the water.
“What the Hindu philosophers understood is that as long as you are caught in this dualistic thinking of good and evil, you are still trapped in the game of opposites. You are trapped in the illusion of Maya and suffering. These two parts of us are represented by Vishnu, the preserver, and Shiva, the destroyer.”
As she spoke, she pointed with the stick to the two lower corners of the triangle etched in the sand. She then traced a line up to the peak.
“If I were to parallel this Trimurti to Christianity, Jesus would be the preserver of our divine nature, and the Holy Spirit would be the destroyer of our illusions. But you have to think of the destroyer as a necessary part of your soul’s evolution. You have to have a death of the egotistic nature in order to have new life. The Holy Spirit is God breaking your world apart, granting you grace to remember who you truly are.”
I could tell that Christine wanted to let those thoughts just sink in for a while. She shifted her gaze, looking farther down the beach in search of something else.
“Do they sell icecream at the canteen over there?” she asked.
“Yes,” I replied.
That was enough of our lesson for the day.
Conversations with Christine Series
Becky has been exploring creativity, spirituality, and the patterns that shape us through her ongoing series, Conversations with Christine. The series imagines two sisters in deep conversation about life’s larger questions, who we are, what shapes us, and why we are here.
Chapter 1: Archetypes, Symbols and Talismans ·
Chapter 2: Defining the Ego ·
Chapter 3: Woundings ·
Chapter 4: Vices and Virtues ·
Chapter 5: The Spiritual Practice of Journaling ·
Chapter 6: Redefining God ·
Chapter 7: Trinities
Chapter 8: Reconnecting
Chapter 9: Evolution of Consciousness
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