DID you have such a joyously good time on Christmas Day that you wished there could be a rerun before Chinese New Year? This is no flight of fancy, but yes.
Jet it to Montenegro, Belarus, Eritrea, Moldova, Lebanon, or Ukraine and it is Christmas Day again on Jan 7.
The double Christmas is traceable to the year 1582, when Europe switched from using the Julian to the Gregorian calendar.
The Julian calendar is 13 days behind the Gregorian, and Jan 7 is 13 days after Dec 25.
On both Christmas days, the pious will recite these verses from the Bible: “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take to you Mary your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 1:20).
The angel said to Mary: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Highest will overshadow you; therefore, also, that Holy One who is to be born will be called the Son of God” (Luke 1:35).
These verses, composed 40 to 70 years after Jesus’ death, speak of three entities – the Holy Spirit, the Son of God, and the Highest.
By CE325, Christian leaders had formulated a Trinity doctrine of three Persons in God expressed in the Nicene Creed as “the Father,” “the only Son of God” and “the Holy Spirit”.
As pointed out in this column two weeks ago, there are broadly two types of scriptural verses: universal and contextual.
Universal verses bear content that is identical to verses in the scriptures of all other religions.
Contextual verses and their spinoff doctrines such as the Nicene Creed are specific to a civilisation, its geography, politics and customs of the people.
Past attempts to foist supremacist but contextual doctrines upon non-believers have led to cultural genocide, such as the forced assimilation policy aimed at converting indigenous tribal people in the American continent.
News reports have disclosed that tens of thousands of native children may have died in government-run boarding schools over the decades.
The founder of one such school, Richard Henry Pratt, infamously said in 1892, “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man”.
However, not only one religion went overboard in missionary work.
The Indian subcontinent centuries ago was turned into a battlefield of religions and remains so to this day.
Incited by clashes between hardliners in Delhi, Hindus and Muslims of South Asian descent fought in the streets of Leicester in Britain three months ago.
Six out of eight nations in South Asia, the world’s most populous region, are ruined by religious extremism sparking violence.
Malaysians have to ask whether they too are laying the tripwires for religious warfare while piously talking about peace.
Almost everywhere it is thumbs up for conversion and thumbs down for collaboration.
Extremism springs from the notion that your religion is supreme in the world and therefore it becomes your duty to convert others from
their religions.
The world’s four biggest religions are guilty of this infraction – some to a far greater degree and others to a much lesser degree.
When you assemble all the contextual verses and doctrines of many religions, do you see irreconcilable differences that must be fought over?
If you do, it means you have a warlike mind and are trapped in an ideological bubble.
If you are truly spiritual, you will be able to synergise these differences so that there is collaboration in religious diversity instead of conflict.
Six countries as mentioned in the opening paragraph found a way to harmonise two conflicting dates for Christmas by celebrating on both days.
Can the Trinity serve as a platform enabling Christians to build collaboration with other religions? Let us examine the formulation.
As the Anglican Church’s Rev Dr Daniel Thomas explains the Trinity does not mean three gods or three roles played by one person.
The “three personal subsistences are coequal and coeternal centres of self-awareness”.
Note the idea of three coequal entities-in-oneness.
The coequality of three powers
– this is the base for collaboration.
The power of three is brought out in the scripture of Taoism where it says: “One gives birth to two, two gives birth to three, and three gives birth to ten thousand things” (Tao Te Ching, 42:1).
The concept is: singularity (taichi or primal force) creates duality (yin and yang or feminine and masculine) and duality gives rise to plurality. All three coexist to produce the web of existence.
The lesson for inter-religious acceptance is that in our quest for a singular truth, we must accept that there are natural opposites and these opposites give birth to a plurality of concepts.
Another scripture is the I Ching which uses a trigram (three stacked horizontal lines) to denote the trinity of heaven, earth and humanity.
This is not intended to imply the supremacy of humans over non-human lives but is meant to convey the ideal of living in conformity with the laws of divinity and nature.
Many ancient civilisations extol a triune unity of father, God-mother nature-filial humanity. They have devised the metaphor of a divine child (humanity) fathered by God and born to a virgin (nature).
But politics intruded to commandeer the metaphor to establish a ruler’s divine appointment to govern.
Alexander the Great secured the title “Son of God” to rule Egypt, and Augustus Caesar was recognised as the “Son of God” and, hence, legitimately the emperor of Rome.
In China, the emperor ruled as the “Son of Heaven” while in Japan the emperor to this day claims descent from the sun goddess Amaterasu Omikami with whom the emperor shares a meal at his accession.
For Jesus to be acknowledged as the “Son of God”, he also had to be a king.
Hence, when Jesus entered Jerusalem during the Passover Feast a vast crowd waving palm branches broke into cheers and greeted him with the words: “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in God’s name! Yes! The King of Israel!” (John 12:13).
In Hinduism, the trinity takes the form of Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver and Shiva the transformer.
The takeaway here is that existence is a continuous process of creating forms, preserving them and seeing them change. Without change, there is no existence and no life.
The most well-known Buddhist trinity is the Triple Gem comprising the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha.
Buddha is the historical founder or the buddha-nature, Dharma is the sacred canon or the natural law and Sangha is the order of monks as well as the community of all right-living people.
The Triple Gem teaches that interfaith collaboration is possible if we operate our minds like a camera, zooming in to the microcosmic level of believers and zooming out to embrace humanity in toto.
When people give up the craving to establish worldwide supremacy for their particular religions, or to put their country’s nationalism on a divisive ethnoreligious basis, then only have nations begun the long walk towards fulfilling the Christmas herald for peace on earth to all humanity.
The writer champions interfaith harmony. Comments: letters@thesundaily.com