This I Believe

This I believe:

1. God is. Nothing else really matters.
2. God is love. He is the trinity of Lover, Love, Beloved in neverending exchange.
3. The logic of love is creation~the sharing of love.
4. The gap between humanity and God demanded redemption. The continued gap calls out for salvation.
5. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him, not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it...  And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

 I accept the formulation of the Nicene creed, and I choose to be a submissive daughter of the Roman Catholic church, never blind to its greed, sins, and administrative blunders, but joyful in its life in the Spirit, the beauty of its traditions, and the communion of its saints.

I Believe

Between the time I started my meditations on the creed and the time I finished, the Church introduced a new translation of the Roman Missal.  Instead of "We believe..." the creed as it is proclaimed at Mass now says "I believe...."

The amount of consternation that caused was stunning.

The super conservatives seem to think that the 1970s translation was part of a plot on the part of "progressives" to weaken the church. Ha! Take that progressives. We've gone back to the real creed.

The super liberal folks seem to think that the new translation was part of a plot on the part of traditionalists to drag us back to the Council of Trent and overturn Vatican II. (Either that or a plot on the part of the hierarchy to distract us from the pedophile scandals.) Oh woe!

It isn't clear to me whether the Greek text as proclaimed at the Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople used the plural or singular form.  The Roman Missal, however, the liturgical version, has always used Credo or "I believe..." as the form for each of us standing up at Mass and proclaiming our own belief.

The conflict is a shame and a pity. What matters is that I believe it.  

Life

We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.  Amen.

Nicene Constantinople Creed

Aging is an interesting process.  Most of it involves letting go, letting go until things boil down to their essence.   What things do I keep? What objects to I actually need? What matters enough to spend my time on it?   When you peel away layers you come to "What is life" or "Is there life after death?" 

The great good news of Christianity is, yes, there is life after death. Jesus came and took on humanity which is to say He accepted death and in doing so destroyed it.   Paul called him the "first fruits of those who are asleep," (1Corinthians 15:20).  He's the first fruits, we're the harvest.

My grandson is Jewish. At his bris (aka ritual circumcision) the mohel asked about the Covenant.  "What do we promise?" We promise to obey His law. I anticipated that answer, but the next one was, "What does He promise in return?"  No easy response occurred to me. His other grandmother had no hesitation.  "Life."  God promises life.

Perhaps the whole long history of Judeao-Christianity, indeed, perhaps all religion, boils down to the search for life.  We find it in God, only in Him.

Baptism

We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.  

Nicene-Constantinople Creed

What's with acknowledge?  The rest of the creed has been believe, believe, believe. Now we have acknowledge.  The new Roman missal actually translates it as confess.   Google translate uses confess.

The Oxford English Dictionary presents some definitions for both.   It translates confess as 
-To acknowledge, own, or admit.
-To acknowledge, concede, grant or admit for oneself an assertion [as true]

To confess is to acknowledge.   The definitions for acknowledge shed a little more light.  To acknowledge is:

-To recognize something to be what it is specified to be.

-To accept the authority, validity, or legitimacy of [something].

-To accept the truth of something.

It also can be defined as a legal term with which someone signs on to accept the truth of a proposition.

All those apply.   It seems that acknowledge (or confess) implies use of the mind. Belief does not require that we understand things.  Acknowledge implies active acceptance that there is one and only one baptism.  In our time it may be practiced by many denominations, but we acknowledge it as the same baptism.  Baptism is one of the sacraments that does not require the action of an ordained priest and could therefore be handed forward from the apostles in an unbroken line from Christian to Christian.  This is in sharp contrast to priestly ordination which we believe could only be handed on from ordained bishop to priest in an unbroken line to the ordination of the apostles.

Baptism forgives sins. Of course it does.  In the early church baptism, an adult-only   sacrament, was frequently postponed, at least in part, for that reason. Constantine is only one prominent example of someone who put it off until his deathbed.  While the forgiveness of sin (and the fact that Jesus vested the right to forgive with the Church) existed from earliest times, the primitive church did not practice the Sacrament of Reconciliation as we know it. Forgiveness of sins in manner distinct from Baptism boiled up as an issue in years after persecutions in response to the question, "Can those previously baptized persons who denied the faith to save their skins be forgiven?" Those who answered no were found ultimately to be heretics.   Eventually the problem of sins after Baptism had to be resolved, but there was never any doubt that in Baptism itself there is a clean slate, the forgiveness of sin in all its forms.

Church

We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.

Nicene-Constantinople Creed.

This one is a mouthful. We believe in the Church, but what do we believe about it?  

 It is the People of God first and foremost--the people! 

It is also the Body of Christ.  That is enough to keep us up late pondering.  We, the Church are the Body of Christ, hands and feet, ears and voice, heart and mind.

It is the Temple of the Holy Spirit.   The place we find the Holy Spirit. The place we encounter God. Except, the Church isn't a place.  Up until 70AD even Christians went up to the Second Temple in Jerusalem, where the God's people had been taught they would encounter Him.  Christians were gradually understanding the People of God somewhat differently and after Titus razed the whole thing, the concept of an invisible temple, with the Holy Spirit as its life and the force behind all its saving actions began to flower.

But what about one holy catholic and apostolic?  We believe the Church has all four attributes.

The Church is one because of her source / her founder. (Catechism of the Catholic Church 813).  Jesus prayed to his father: "...that they [meaning the Church] may be one just as We are."     John 17:11   Luckily unity doesn't preclude some diversity because we have plenty of that.

The Church is holy because because of (and to the extent of) her unity with Christ.  That doesn't in any way overlook the chronic sinfulness of individuals and the earthy institutions they create in His name.   The Church as Christ created it, the mystical Body of Christ is holy.  Some of its members, not so much.  We'd be fools to try to pretend otherwise.

The Church is catholic because it is universal. That's what the word means, universal. Where there is Christ, there is the Church (Catechism 830).  His love is universal.  The Church isn't European. It certainly isn't American. He was Jewish, but the Church isn't Jewish.  It is universal and we do well to stay aware that we don't confuse cultural biases with the fundamentals of the Church.

The Church is apostolic because it was founded on the apostles--not by them, on them. The eyewitness generation was the foundation. With the direction of the Holy Spirit she holds fast the the faith handed down by the foundation. (Catechism 857).

The Church we believe in, in short, transcends the Church we see, the one we read about in the news, the one whose history we both love and question.  It is more than the pastor's sermons, the church lady's whispers after mass, the demands of charity, parish gossip, diocesan financial problems, bishops' letters, papal encyclicals, architecture both bad (1970's churchs--shudder) and stunning, magnificent art or tacky images, great schools and small ones, mission appeals, Knights of Columbus, and retreat houses.  It is certainly more than the ugly headlines we've endured in recent years. It is none of those things and yet it is all of them, bound up in Christ's redemptive work.

Postscript
Paul, as usual, nails it. Ephesians 2:19-22:

[we are] members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the capstone. Through him the whole structure is held together and grows into a temple sacred in the Lord; in him you also are being built together into a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.202122

Prophets

He has spoken through the prophets.

The Nicene-Constantinople Creed

Hear the word of the Lord...listen to the instruction of our God.

Isaiah 1:10

Pop "the word of the Lord" into any of the Bible search engines now ubiquitous on the Internet and you will get pages and pages of references from Genesis 15:, "the word of the Lord came to Abram, to 1Peter 1:25, "the word of the Lord remains forever and this is the word that has been proclaimed to you...." Those two references alone represent a two thousand year stretch.

The prophets were not fortune tellers. They didn't divine the future or act as seers.  The prophets heard God speak and were compelled to proclaim the word of God to His people.  The content of the message was always the will of God, what He expected people to do, how He expected them to live their lives.  It still is.  John L. McKenzie SJ calls that word The Two Edged Sword.

The remarkable thing is God speaks to ordinary people.  Gideon plowing his field, Amos tending his sheep, Peter fishing--even Moses tending sheep--heard God speak directly to them.  His voice wasn't always that of the great and powerful. Isaiah heard it in the night and Elijah heard a still small voice.  I suspect we all could hear it if we would but listen.The 

Creed is clear on one thing, when God speaks it is the Holy Spirit that does the speaking.

Spirit

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son.  With the Father and the Son he is worshipped and glorified.  

Nicene-Constantinople Creed

Spirit as concept: easy. Spirit as person: hard.

An earlier post described the Holy Spirit as the loving part of the three persons that are the one God.  We have Lover, Beloved and the Love that passes between them, the act of loving, that is the Holy Spirit.  Loving personified. 

It is the Holy Spirit that permeates our entire spiritual life.  The Spirit leads us to prayer and teaches us how.  The gifts of the spirit enable us to live out the life that comes to us in Christ.  Wisdom, understanding, counsel (right judgement), fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord--each one is required before we can begin to grow in virtue and exercise the life of Christ in us.  Each one is given at baptism.  Our problem is remembering they are there and exercise them. 

How do we know if we are living that life, using those gifts?  The gifts enable us to bear fruit. When the fruits of the spirit shine out in our lives, we know that His gifts are being used to good purpose.  Galatians 5:22-23 tells us "the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control..."
So we put our entire being in the hands of Loving Personified and hope to bear fruit for the well-being of the kingdom and the glory of God.

One side note. Some people think the Holy Spirit is the perfect expression of the sacred feminine.  One hopes She agrees.

Kingdom

...and his kingdom will have no end.

Nicene-Constantinople Creed

This phrase seems to imply that the kingdom is already here.  The Kingdom of God is at hand.  "At hand" could mean coming any moment but it could also mean we can reach out and touch it. It is right under our noses.

Sometimes when I used to walk in downtown Columbus near the state capital I would think about working in the City of Man but living in the City of God.  The two coexist in space but, while the City of Man exists only in time, and that fleeting,  the City of God exists out of time and for all time.

The kingdom will have no end.

Judge

He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, 

Nicene-Constantinople Creed

Whoa. Trailing clouds of glory. Christians have been waiting for that one for over 2000 years, and yet the first time He came, He was poor, humble and hidden.

It should be no small relief to any of us that when the time comes for our life to be weighed, the one sitting there will be the God of mercy and his son who loved us so much he became one of us.

Ascended

He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. 

Nicene-Constantinople Creed

This isn't a dogma I struggle with; I just accept it. The post-easter stories are fascinating.  They don't follow any linear pattern so we can create a timeline of His activities but a few things are very consistent among them.

Key among them is that He came to them in bodily form not ghostly form. The Thomas story is the obvious case of that. Thomas had to touch and feel. (Our weekend assistant pastor says "Good for Him. We shouldn't always believe hearsay!") Luke repeats a similar story in which Jesus invites them to touch him. At Emmaus the recongized him when he ate with them. Luke and John have various stories of him eating with them.

He came, He visited, He ate with them, He continued to teach and then he was lifted up.

The Feast of the Ascension 2009

The meaning of Christ's Ascension expresses our belief that in Christ the humanity that we all share has entered into the inner life of God in a new and hitherton unheard of way. It means that man has found an everlasting place in God...Jesus Himself is what we call heaven.

Benedict xvi

Let us live in joyful expectation of His return in glory! 

to which I add--the time in which we join Him

Rose

On the third day he rose again in fulfillment of the Scriptures; 

Nicene-Constantinople Creed

This is the thing, this is the reality the first generation, the eye-witness generation was at great pains to tell us.   This is the miraculous thing.

Resurrection of the dead was not an unknown concept in the first century. We can see from the New Testament that it was a hot debate among Jews with the Pharisees (like Paul!) firmly holding that the dead would rise and the Sadducee's arguing against.

Is it any wonder Paul was ready to believe in Resurrection when he heard the voice of Jesus on his way to Damascus?  He would later write "he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead." Colossions 1:18

Luke claimed to have heard it from others but her wrote about events "just as those who were eyewitnesses from the beginning and ministers of the word have handed them down to us..." ( Luke 1:2: )

Was the author of 2Peter the apostle Peter? Scholars suggest not. Whoever wrote it wrote as if he too were an eyewitness, "We did not follow cleverly devised tales when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of His majesty." (2Peter 1:16)

And again Paul wrote "After that, he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at once, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep." (1Corinthians 15:6)

We have no such access to eyewitnesses. "We walk by faith and not by sight." (2Corinthians 5:7) That's as it should be; the saints walk with us. Is it not logical that he would go back to His Father?

Died

For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered, died, and was buried.  

Nicene-Constantinople Creed

Why did Jesus have to die? Because he was a human being. To be born is to die; we start dying the day we're born. Every woman who gives birth gives birth to a child who will come to natural death eventually--or, God forbid, premature death.  The big thing was the Incarnation. Everything else flows from that.

Did God want His son to die? You hear that question, but I think it is absurd.  It sounds as if they sat around in heavan planning it out, "and then--crucifixion."  No, I don't think so. The decision was to be fully human. The will of the Father was "don't interfere." Don't interfere with their free will; don't interfere with nature; live it out to the very end. He took on our life and He took on our death.

Why crucifixion? Was that of His own choosing? Look to mankind for that. Men invented that and myriad other forms for torture, for control, for manipulation all designed to seek power over one another. He came, poor and humble, and subjected Himself to human nature. Was it inevitable? Tempting thought. Evil inevitably attacks good I think.

Man

For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven; by the power of the Holy Spirit he was born of the Virgin Mary, and became man.   

                                                                 Nicene-Constantinople Creed

Of all the great tenets of Christianity, Incarnation is the most logical. God, being entirely Love by nature wants--needs--to draw men to Himself. We could not bridge the huge gulf dividing us from God, the gulf the Church calls Original Sin, or simply sin. Only God could bridge that gap.  We could not go to Him, He had to come to us.

and so, the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us...

                                                                       John 1:14

One in Being

...the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, one in Being with the Father.  Through him all things were made.                                                                                                 Nicene-Constantinople Creed

 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be. John 1:1-3

The Trinity falls into the area of "things too wonderful for me" to understand. What I do get is that God is Love and there is a logic to the assumption that in Love there must be a lover, a beloved and the love that passes between them.  The Son, the Word is the beloved part of the one Love. 

Obviously, as John 1 shows,  Christians were clear on the "One in Being" part by the beginning of the second century AD. 

Lord

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ... Nicene-Constantinople Creed.

Lord--Κύριον or Kyrie in Greek--Dóminum in Latin--we now use "Lord" almost exclusively to mean "God."  

Social relationships shifted greatly between the first century and, for example, the twelfth, Our own concepts for kings and lords come entirely from the middle ages and from European aristocracy stretching into the 19th century.  American romance novels are full of "yes my Lord" and "His Lordship."  The idea seems oddly out of place in 21st century America.

But what did Kyrie mean when the Old Testament was translated in 100BC? I gather that the earlier Hebrew was Adonai for Lord and synonymous with "God."  The Septuagent translaters used Kyrie. Paul would have read "Kyrie" as God. He uses Kyrie/Dominus for Jesus in the first century and there it is in the fourth century Nicene language: Kyrie/Dominus.

So if Kyrie is synonymous with God, what is the connotation? What does it say about our relationship with God?

My search of Latin dictionaries brings back "master" as the meaning of Dominus. It comes from the same root as the English "dominate," that is the Latin Dominari, to rule.  I can't help wondering if it isn't also related to "Domus" or household--implying that to rule is to be head of the family or household. I wasn't able to document that.  

I found "master" and "ruler" as alternative translations of Adonai.  Regardless of the era or the social context, "Lord" always implies the man in charge, the one to whom some sort of obedience is owed.   What do we have in our own era that conveys such meaning? "Boss" doesn't seem to cover it. 

Household implies family--authority, yes, but loving authority.

I believe in one Master, Jesus Christ.  That fits. That is what I believe. I am of the household of Jesus and he is the Master of the household.

Maker

We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen. Nicene-Constantinople Creed

Here's the easy one, the beginning of what I believe: Wake up. Look around. Wow--who made this? 

For this part the Baltimore Catechism hit it just right. Who is God? God is the supreme being who made all things. Who made me? God made me.   

Then it gets complicated. Why did God make me? He made me to know, love, and serve Him in this world and to be happy with Him in the next. 

I was twelve when I asked the question, "Is there a God? Because if there isn't this religion thing doesn't make much sense." The experience that followed the question is hard to describe.  What it left me with was the sure knowledge that God is and that He is the hub around which my existence revolves. He is the centering reality that gives form to my life.  Everything else is secondary.

Winter

And perhaps I shall stay or even spend the winter with you, so that you may send me on my way wherever I may go. 1 Corinthians 16:6

Sometimes you have to begin again. Late winter, just before Lent is one of those times.

My journey never stopped but this blog dropped by the wayside along the way. This seems like a good time to pick it up again. This time I hope to reflect on two topics: 1) what I believe and 2) marriage. What do I believe? I'm a Nicene Christian--and  Roman Catholic. 

I still struggle with discerning God's will for my future, but less than before. It isn't really necessary to see the entire road map, only to continue the journey, "wherever I may go" and to trust that he is leading one step at a time. His word is a lamp to my path.