Three Rings

By Bobby Neal Winters

Man is a tool-making animal.  We have tools for everything.  We even have tools for contemplation.  Among those are the Borromean Rings.

For those of you who don’t know what the Borromean Rings are and would rather drive than look them up on Wikipedia, I suggest driving down Euclid Street on the block just west of Walnut.  That is where St. Peter’s Episcopal Church is.  

St. Peter’s is as lovely a little church as ever was.  It has two circular stained glass windows in the gables of its southern exposure.  The one on top features Borromean Rings.

They are a religious symbol, but they are also a mathematical object.  I’d never heard of them until I was working on my doctorate in topology and picking up a little knot theory as I went.  To be precise--and that’s what we mathematicians do--the Borream Rings are not a knot; they are a link.  They are a link, each component of which is an unknotted circle.  What makes them special to mathematicians is that no two of the circles are linked together.  It is only in their totality--with all three together--that they are linked.

As you might guess, it’s the last part that engages with religion. They are used as a symbol of the Triune God.  Each piece is a perfect circle which represents eternity.  The fact that the components don’t form a link when any piece is missing, symbolized the unity of the whole.

If you aren’t into church, you might be familiar with them from Ballantine Beer, which uses them as a symbol.  Ballantine Beer was bought by the Pabst Brewing Company and is still available.  So you can drink beer, get religion, and learn about math all at one time.

I’m thinking about the Borromean Rings now in connection with a woodworking project. I am making boxes.  And, of course, that is all any woodworker or carpenter does, but these are special boxes.  They are Bible Boxes.  The idea is that you make a box for someone to put their Bible into, a special Bible.  Maybe one that has been in the family for a long time and needs a bit of protection.

The Bible is a tool we use on our journey toward godliness. Even though we don’t worship the Bible--and we shouldn’t--we do revere it.  Reverence for an object requires mindfulness and taking care.

It occurs to me that I am using the word “Bible” in a couple of different ways here.  There is the Bible as the ancient collection of literature in the Christian Tradition, but there are specific copies of it.  You can’t put the first one in a box; indeed it has a long history of not being contained.  You can put the particular ones with memories and family histories in boxes.

In making my latest Bible Box, it occurred to me that I could decorate it appropriately.  I first had the idea of putting a cross on it--and I may eventually do this--but that seemed too simple.  I thought of maybe decorating the Cross a bit, fitting in INRI around the center.

But then I was inspired.

The Borromean Rings.  They were symbolic of the whole Bible, both Old and New Testaments.  They also had special mathematical meaning to me.  Wherever this box winds up, there will be that visible connection to the mathematician who made it.

Of course I’d never actually carved anything like that on a box before.  I’d put the first letters of my grandson’s first names on boxes I’d made for them, but this was a bit more complicated.

The first step in doing a carving like this on wood is realizing that there are ways to do it.  As a dedicated Okie, that is the first hurdle I always have to overcome. 

Given there is more than one way, you then need to pick one of them. (I follow the method of Mary May on YouTube.)  This requires special tools, yet another set of chisels.

Then you draw a picture of what you are going to carve on the wood you are using.  As these are circles, I used the dividers I have that help me to measure my dovetails to scratch the circles in the wood.

Then I started carving, after having sharpened my carving chisels.  You have to show them the proper reverence.

I actually carved three of them.  The second looked better than the first and the third looked good enough to use.

The box is almost done.  In fact, it could be called done now. I could plop an old bible from my mother-in-law’s family in it right now and be done.  There’s a little voice in my head that’s telling me to line it with velvet, so I reckon I’m going to have to do that.

Everything was easier when I was just making boxes to store my own stuff in.  This being reverent is hard.

While doing the Borromean Rings, I saw how I could do the Trefoil Knot, yet another symbol of the Trinity, so I’ve already started on that project.

I will say this: It has been a tool for contemplation.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.