The Cheesecake Mystery

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Cheesecakes have always been a delight to my taste buds. But, until recently, I never realized the deep meaning it points to. It isn’t about its taste although I prefer the classic strawberry cheesecake over all other variants of cheesecake. It is the cake’s s
tructure that really helped me understand a deeper reality.

In Christian theology, we have something known as the mysteries of faith. These mysteries have be
en revealed by God to us and we believe it by faith since our human reason is not so perfect so as to comprehend it. Nevertheless, we try to explain these mysteries by way of analogies. One of the most challenging mysteries to analogise (don’t bother searching through a Dictionary, because I have just coined it… it means to explain by analogy) is the mystery of the Trinity. There have been many attempts made towards explaining this mystery, the most popular one being St. Patrick’s clover leaf. A more contemporary attempt that I have come across has used the Snickers bar to explain the Holy Trinity. However, I feel that it is a cheesecake that could help us understand the ‘three persons in one God’ mystery.

The cheesecake is a whole in itself and consists of three layers. Each layer is important; devoid of one of them, the resulting dish is not a cheesecake. While the three layers are intrinsic to the cheesecake, they remain distinct from each other. This is the same way the Trinity works. The three layers of the cheesecake are like the three persons in the Trinity. (A caveat for all reading: The comparison of the three layers to the three persons of the Trinity does not imply that there is a hierarchy among the three, rather it is just an expression). The cheesecake can be compared to God and the three layers to the three persons of the Trinity. Without one, the Trinity would not exist. We could go on explaining and defending the cause but what is important is that we understand the mystery of the Trinity in all its richness. My simple suggestion is this: the next time you buy or make a cheesecake, observe it closely and you too would see the deep symbolism of the Trinity hidden in it.

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