I once had an instructor who remarked, “Whoever heard of someone entering the Catholic Church because of the Nicene Creed?” My difficulty with this statement at the time was that I had returned to the Church specifically because I had found, articulated in the Creed, something about the mystery of God revealed in terms that spoke to my heart. In this instructor’s comment I recognized that something felt wrong. After some thought, I was able to articulate the sense that a sort of caricature was being drawn. There are those who “feel” their relationship with God. Then there are those who think about God. It was as though my instructor was saying that the two were not only separate, but that “feeling” was somehow more important than “thinking about” God. In my professor’s eyes, the statements found in the Creed spoke to people who were attempting to formulate proofs for the existence of God, rather than attempting to know God in their hearts. Though I could not articulate it at the time, intuitively, I knew otherwise.

It is easy for the modern reader to forget that we read the Creed, and indeed early Christian authors in general, through centuries of experience and development of dogma. Perhaps we do not always think of these things the way that early Christians did. We forget to ask why the formulation of the Creed emerged and how it might have affected the lives of the people who developed it. The Creed did not simply spring from someone’s mind and onto a piece of paper. The ideas were argued over, struggled with and refined. The words describe the experience of those who were coming to terms with basic questions about God the Father, who Jesus is, and how the Holy Spirit was being revealed to them. They were passed along through the centuries because there were no better words available. For early Christian writers these were not just matters of the intellect, but matters that were intimately connected to their relationship with God.

As I think about the Creed now, I realize how dependent I am upon the words it contains to help ground my own perception. Statements about the Father, Son and Holy Spirit describe both what I have come to believe through scripture, but also something about my experience of God. I trust there is one God, but I also know that what I understand of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit can appear to be three very different realities. How, then, do I account for these experiences and pieces of revelation while still maintaining belief in the One? Why do I sometimes pray to God, sometimes to Jesus, and sometimes with the Holy Spirit? Why do I feel like certain prayers, with certain Persons of the Trinity, are more appropriate at certain times? I know that this mystery is touching my heart, but how can I describe the nature of that mystery? In this way, the statements of the Creed speak to me as emerging out of a sort of theoretical mysticism that I have not always recognized. These thoughts have to do with how I understand salvation and are an attempt to describe my relationship to God: the Creator, the Sanctifier, the Redeemer, the One and the Three. The words of the Creed help root me and guide me. They give me something a little more tangible to hold onto as I attempt to articulate what is ultimately ineffable.

As we race through the Creed at mass, saying the words by rote, do we remember it took years for the thoughts that our lips are forming to emerge from the heart of Christianity? Who Jesus Christ is continues to be a mystery to Christians. How the Holy Spirit is present is nearly impossible to relate to those who do not believe. None of us are born knowing how to talk about God; we have to learn how to articulate our experience. The words we choose change the ways that we see God at work. The Creed’s words, when carefully considered, help us in this. They speak to the heart of faith by causing us to name our belief and wrestle with the ways that the understanding of our tradition is articulated. The words of the Creed can help still the mind and give a person the sense that there is more to their understanding of God than meets the eye. The Creed offers no easy answers, even though the statements are easy enough to say. Rather than letting this be a stumbling block, however, if we give ourselves to the possibility of wrapping our minds around the words, we might find that the words will enrapture us. Instead of rushing thoughtlessly through the dogmatic tenets of the Creed, we can choose to roll the thoughts over in our minds, allowing them to lead us to a different type of awareness.

Like the early thinkers in the Church, our sense of being Christian can join the spiritual to the theoretical, the intellectual to the emotional. The Creed is not void of affect; it was formed out of affect. In our thoughtful recitation of the Creed every week we are reminded, again and again, that God is always more than humans can comprehend, and that how we think about God ultimately affects our perception of our relationships, with the Father, the Son, and with everyone else. While the intellect and the affect are hardly the same, there is a very specific connection between the two, and we can choose to allow reason to merge with emotion and find light in the eternal mystery. If we believe what we say, the way that we think will ultimately affect how we process what we feel. We can connect our intellect to our hearts, and come to recognize that even in our inadequate statements of belief, there is something of a truth that, while defying logic, somehow expands our understanding and broadens our awareness of our relationship with God.

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