The Trinity is not found in Scripture, other than a questionable passage in I John 5:7-8 about there being three witnesses: the Spirit, the water and the blood. Some manuscripts, including the Textus Receptus, have that passage expanded to “there are three witnesses in Heaven, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, and three witnesses on earth, the Spirit, the water, and the blood.” The more conservative Christians will insist that the expanded reading, by being part of the Textus Receptus, is an absolute asserion of the Trinity, but it seems evident that it was an early expansion of John’s words since it is absent from most of the older manscripts.
However, it is a logical conclusion from beliefs that are clearly aserted in Scripture. (I refuse to dredge out a shopping list of prooftexts for these.) First, there is only one God worth the name: YHWH Lord of Hosts. Second, Jesus is God Incarnate as a human being. (Two supporting elements: He is referred to as Kyrie, “Lord,” a title extended only to God, over and over again; twice Paul calls Him God explicitly, in unequivocl context. Finally, the Spirit of God is unquestionably God, and the experience of the early Christians was that the Spirit is a person distinct from the Father and Son, as well as being the Paraclete whom Jesus promises He will have God (i.e., the Father) send.
Now, most Christians will say that your worship should be directed at the Holy Trinity alone. Protestants are fairly unanimous that all prayers are directed at the Three-Person God or at one of His Persons. Requesting the intercession of a saint who has presumably gone to Heaven and enjoys God’s ear is considred acceptable and even proper piety by Catholics, Orthodox, and many Anglicans. It is considered to trespass on the worship due to God alone by most Protestants. Mary is just the top-ranked Saint on the all time Saint Hit Parade, combining a a monotheization of the human tendency to have a mother goddess with the honor due her (and called for in Scripture, by the way) as the one who humbly accepted God’s commission to bear the Messiah – and hence became the only human being ever to have God inside her in an other-than-receive-cmmunion sense. Because early heresies attempted to relate the Christ role to God in ways other than the orthodox Trinitarian understanding, the Fourth General Council defined explicitly that Jesus was always God the Son, even from before birth, in a hypostatic union of the mortal human and the divine, and in consequence that Mary was the Bearer of God, the Theotokos, and deserving of honor as such. This is a Christological doctrine, not a Mariological one, in origin and as maintained by the Orthodox today.
The Episcopal Church, being a liturgical church, has standard written prayers used in public worship. I once did a census of these, out of curiosity, to see to whom they were addressed.
About 20% were to “God” unspecified. About 70% were addressed to the Father, referred to as God or Lord in most cases, but concluding with “through Jesus Christ our Lord” and in a few cases mentioning his Fatherhood. About 10% were addressed to Jesus. A couple of prayers are directed at the Holy Trinity explicitly, i.e., addressed to all three Persons. One of these requires three pray-ers speaking separately, each directing his passage to one of the three Persons, following which the first person to pray adds a concluding paragraph addressed to the Trinity. (This is the only case in which a prayer directed at the Holy Spirit specifically occurs in the BCP.) Interestingly, the prayers directed at Jesus seem to be much more “heart prayers” as opposed to “head prayers” – emontionally rather than logically based petitions.
From what I know of Catholic liturgics, it would be quite possible to live out one’s life as a faithful Catholic, and even a priest, without ever once praying to Mary or another saint – the corporate prayers and much of the personal devotions are directed at God in one of His Persons. The cultus of Mary and of the saints is very much a matter of personal devotion or joint prayers of like-minded people in a non-mandatory context. (The Angelus, which focuses on the Hail Mary, and the Rosary, are examples of such personal devotions.)
There is a logical disconnect betwen Jesus as “Son of God” and Jesus as “God the Son” which Christians do not attempt to decipher – the terms are synonymous despite their obvious apparent paradoxicality.
or you’re labouring under some very serious misconceptions. I don’t know of any religions that treat either of them as a deity, although admittedly some schools of Catholicism can give that impression, at least where Mary is concerned.