The Trinity

By Valred Olsim

The cross-carrying armored conquerors came with ordained swords – purging the pagan relics and substituting them with the Christian religious icons. Then, the paths were named after the Saints, and villages were named after Christian doctrines, events and symbols. The unification of lands at the foot of Montanosa was named “La Union” (The Union), and the valley town where the Cabacera (Capitol) overlooks “three prominent hills” was named “La Trinidad” (The Trinity).

The skeptic may insist that La Trinidad was named after Spanish Soldier Guillermo Galvey’s wife, Donya Trinidad, but Galvey’s military records show no wife, and the name “La Trinidad” was actually recorded to have been given by Galvey’s successor Commandante Manuel Scheidnagel, decades after Galvey’s death. As an imperative, Conquistadors dedicate a subjugated place to their Christian faith, or to the Royal crown…not to their wives or girlfriends.

Before the Trinity of Benguet, there was the island of “Trinidad (and Tobago)” which was encountered by Christopher Columbus in his “third” voyage. It was named similarly to the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity which holds that God is three consubstantial persons or hypostases—the Father, the Son (Jesus Christ), and the Holy Spirit— or as "one God in three Divine Persons".

The number three is popular in the context of symbolism and spirituality. It can refer to the harmony of “Mind, Body, and Spirit”, the “3^rd Dimension”, the “three wishes”, the resurrection on the “3^rd day”, the “three stages” of birth, life, and death, the “three timelines” of past, present, and future. Hence, the number “three” is said to mean “completion”.

An i-La Trinidad friend reminded me that for a successful life, one must have the three essentials of friends, family, and faith. A day should be fun, fruitful and fair. And we should always have the three values of love, hope, and joy. Three is indeed, a special number. Just the same, the Trinity (La Trinidad), is a very special place to me.

****

With newfound vigor, I’m back to the job of telling good stories about the Trinity (La Trinidad). Despite the mounting number of meetings and paper works, we made sure that we will have a year-ender event which is related to tourism. Hence, we have organized the 2^nd La Trinidad Tourism Conference on December 20, 2017 at the beautiful Mt. Kalugong Eco-park. We imagine it to be a meeting of tourism stakeholders and tourism-interested members of the community, and at the same time an avenue to appreciate the gems of our town (since the yearly conferences will be held on the different tourist spots of La Trinidad). We will also have an afternoon music jam to further add value to the event experience while offering coffee and wine to the attendees! Due to the limited capacity of the mountain park and the unique condition of the access road, we only produced 200 tickets to effectively manage the activity. Interested persons may visit the Mayor’s Office for the registration forms and tickets! Asen taha shiman da! Men-iila tako isdi! Kitakits!

"Squatter"

He counted the men with powerful tools and concluded that they are almost as many as the thirty armed uniforms that came to assist them. The resonance of the beating and piercing instruments reminded him of the same sight five years ago – when ‘they’ demolished his make-shift home upon the court's order. The scars on his head are still throbbing.

His home is similar to the first house they beat with their metal claws; tearing the tin roof apart, kicking the wooden frames, flaking all the tin sheets which served as its cheap wall. In exactly five minutes, they’re done with it. A man with a plastic crown pointed towards his direction and for a moment he frost.

“Ket kasanu? Inya ngay garud ket saan yu nga kanya daytoy lote? Apay Ada TRO yu….?” they approached his home.

He didn’t really understood what TRO is, but, the sight of the gang with big metal tools clearly scared him. He understood that he has to go. “Sir, mabalin nga iparwar tayu pay dagitoy usar ko?”, he can only plead. The engineer batted his eye, he knew that the guy with a plastic crown hated his job. This job.

After pulling out his things, he reminisce the places where he found the bed sheets, the old plastic chair, the frying pan…even that old calendar with a pretty woman. He had felt joy on each event he picked those things because he can add them to his little kingdom. He was, after all,  born poor and had lived with his mother before she died. He didn't have a family since then. He came to the city years ago and managed to survive by doing any work that requires physical labor...it is the only thing that he can offer - his arms, his shoulder, his hips, his legs. These, he knew, won't last for a very long time.

The gang members with metal tools were laughing. It has something to do with one of them who joked about “squatters”. He is familiar with the term because he had heard it often, and have learned to shun it. However, he couldn't understand why one can laugh even on the sight of a grieving person. He only needed less than ten square meters for his life – a place to stay, a place to hide against the sun,  the chill, the rain. 

He heard that the owner already has a lot of houses. He only prayed for a box which he can run to. He wandered away and wept.

He asked God why some people have everything, and some have none; like his existence, his dirt-like existence. 

On Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica: 'God'

(I wrote this for my Educ1b subject when I was in college - hence, the poor organization of ideas. It may not reflect my present views of the metaphysical, but it does comfort me to know that I have thought of these before. :)

One of the greatest discussions and debates on the early cold centuries of humanity is the the existence of a god, or a transcendent being – the ultimate reality that rises above all other existences. Throughout civilization, loads of theologians and philosophers have come up with various propositions and philosophical ideas to disprove or approve the existence of a higher being. The debates never really ended as it was, at a point, not really understood – many modern thinkers have regarded it as if it was without a purpose, nor a meaning.

It was on the 11^th up to the 15^th century when much of the theologians used rationalization and reason to justify a higher being’s existence. It was called scholasticism, which was primarily employed by Thomas Aquinas – one of the great Christian theologians who used this mode of thinking at that time. He published the Summa Theologica in hopes to enlighten the world, and resolve the existential debates, but just like most discoveries and works of man, it faded – buried by tons of counter-prepositions and principles.

One primary flaw of Thomas’ Scholasticism is its very own design. Faith, in which the movement should protect, had been ironically made an option -- scholasticism created a world where reason and faith co-existed (perhaps a perfect excuse to cure its imperfections). However, faith can never be one with reason. The Judeao-Christian concept of faith is to believe without question, that is faith. It will be a great contradiction for Christianity to betray its own foundation by engaging itself to the same weapon which was mainly used by its enemies and critics – logic and reason. It is also very interesting to note that Aquinas used limited objectives on the complicated question of whether a god exists or not. He did not consider any  ‘other’ objectives that ‘may be’ present outside his own mind. Many philosophers, especially existentialists and atheists had come up with hundreds of objectives and questions which were challenging even for Aquinas to answer using his few objectives and propositions (the biggest is Science). In the later years after he died, numerous critique by modern day philosophers dug a pit for his work by citing a comical  cherry-picking on the application of faith and reason in interpreting the bible. From Noah's ark to Yahweh's 'favoritism'.

Thomas Aquinas’ main idea of a 'main mover' in his ‘God’ chapter actually encompasses his sum of five ways. Considering that he used the realm of logic to explain an illogical phenomenon is not just ironic but irresponsible on his part ("since everything that is moved has a mover" logic). The bible cannot explain the universe, at least logically; it cannot explain the event when a woman sprouted from a man’s rib, the  friendly co-existing animals in the garden of Eden, among others. In the realm of reason, the bible stories play like myths and fairy tales. It is also inconsistent to select which part of the bible uses logic, and which part uses faith. If we think that, say, an eternally burning bush is logical, then we are betraying our faith; if we use faith to validate such unusual experience, then we cannot be logical in its sense. See, no matter how impossible and illogical an existence can be, if a person has faith, then he or she must not need any explanation. That is faith, far from the logic used by Scholasticism. To use the Scripture to explain a universal existence damages the fact that other civilizations believe in their own god, outside the Jewish and Christian belief of ‘God’. Would it not constitute prejudice to the different civilizations on the corners of the world to assert a predisposition which intends to serve a selfish desire of personal salvation? Or the; “if you don’t join us, then burn in hell” mentality? Perhaps faith, is simply a belief taught by a society which one, in the sheer accident, belongs to - I, for instance, would've been a muslim if I was born in an Arab country.

Another of Thomas Aquinas’ greater flaw is to 'assume'. How could he be sure that all his reasons exist in such a very enlightened mind (such like his)? How could he assume that there should be an order and a mover? How could he use the system governing the inexplicable universe  in explaining the system that could explain a god’s existence? What made him rank his ways into a more obvious or not? If there is really a prime mover, how could he be sure that the prime mover was the Christian God? How could he say that ‘all man’ recognized the Christian God as their own god? What made him think that he can lay and post his own premise and answer it in his own theories alone?

Questions.

See, ‘truth can only be achieved when it survives numerous questions’. Throughout centuries, the existence of a god was mostly reduced from a debate to a choice – only the person can choose and decide what to believe in. In the 16^th century, Agnosticism was developed for people who choose the middle ground. It proposes that we cannot talk of something that is beyond the facts that we know. That, our minds, which is capsuled in a mere piece of flesh, cannot grasp something that is really vast and transcendent. In the words of a philosopher; ‘how can a god, who has thoughts higher than us, expect us to think like him and know what is to be expected from us?’ Can we really prove or disprove the existence of a god? Whether it is just a concept created by mankind to justify their own existence, whether we created god, or God created us, may not be as important as it was before. A certain joke proposes that ‘debating whether a god exists or not is like lice or flea debating if there is a dog; debating who the real god is like those lice debating the name of the dog’. A drunk I overheard at a bar even shouted, ‘Yes, God can do everything except for one thing…to show himself to us!’. We have to wonder why, just like that drunk; why not show himself and command us lower beings? Why not show him once and for all to settle the minds of the skeptics?…but then, when all questions have been raised, all the faithful will comfort us with the same idea(excuse) that the god/s who can’t show himself/themselves only wanted us to have faith in him/them, even without seeing anything. Faith and reason may never blend.

Just like the tiny ant who will never know the name of the American president, or the dog who will never know the Diplomat of Iraq, our limited consciousness is only restricted by what we experience – far from the knowledge of the gods we want to covet to understand the world, and our existence. We are mere dust and this vast and limitless universe that we know or we wont ever know, and we are only sure of one thing – life. And, if there is that one good thing which can come up from these debates, it is humility and humanity. That, our short lives may be spent for the purpose of living and co-existing with other lives in this world of nations and institutions which pale in comparison with the size of the universe and vast ideas that we will never know. Perhaps, that is what matters most.

(Read Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica here http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/aquinas/summa/index.htm)