A master was approached by his pupil one day while tilling his garden. "Master," the pupil said, "I have recently talked with a Christian, one who claims to be 'Catholic'. He explained that the Christian God is actually composed of three equal beings: The father, the son, and the Holy Spirit. But I am puzzled, master. How can a deity be three distinct entities, and yet just be one god?"

The master looked up from his garden work and smiled. "Ah, my student, have you listened to nothing I have taught you?" The master then pulled out a coin from his pocket. "Look at this coin", he said as he showed the face of it to his student, "what is its shape?"

"Why, it is round, master."

"Now", he said as he turned the coin's edge toward the student, "what is the shape of the coin?"

"It is a line, master."

"Now", he said as he flipped the coin twirling high into the air, "what is the shape of the coin?"

"It is a sphere, master."

As he caught the coin, the master hurled it at the student and asked, "At any point, did the coin ever stop being a coin?"

As the coin painfully bounced off the student's head, he was enlightened.

While I'm not Catholic, and therefore do not have the benefit of years and years of Catholic school (which my wife claims wasn't much of a miss), I have studied church history and doctrine for many, many years. They may make your head hurt, but guys like Origen, Clement, Augustine, and Jerome, if you read them long enough, do a pretty decent job of explaining the transcendental nature of the Trinity that lies at the base of modern Catholic doctrine, even to an apostate Buddhist like me.

Unfortunately very few people outside a divinity college even know who those guys are, let alone what they taught, and so the holy trinity tends to be completely inscrutable to most folks. Especially if they're protestant, since one of the hallmarks of Protestantism is to screw Catholic doctrine up as completely as possible and then force-feed your kids with the result.

So I'd been mulling over the trinity for a long, long time when one Saturday night, while wandering a book store (yes, we're really that boring), I heard an argument over in the history section. A group of teenage boys, I'd say about six or seven of them, by their identical T-shirts a part of one of the endless tour groups that seem to land at Pentagon City Center every day, had apparently decided to gang up on what must've been the only Catholic in their group. The ring leader kept ragging on him with things like "so how can God be a ghost, and still be God?" Basically yet another arrogant preacher's kid, just as tooth-grindingly ignorant as the rest. The poor Catholic kid just kind of mumbled at his tormentors, obviously unwilling or unable to really put up a staunch defense.

I thought up the Koan above as we drove home that night. It does not, of course, explain the full depth of the Trinity. No words can express the transcendental truths of any great religion, be it Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Catholicism, or any of the rest. These are by definition inexpressible experiences that lead one to enlightenment. But I think it did neatly explain the prissy questions that poor kid was being pelted with.

Unfortunately, as with all really great comebacks, by the time I'd cooked this one up its targets were long gone.