Ch. 4 Dark Night of the Soul (continued)
The Nicene Creed
I had long recited the Nicene Creed along with everyone else and did not give too much thought to it. I had assumed it was true since everyone recited it. In my effort to think things through, I decided to look more closely at this creed that I had been pledging all my life. In so doing, I ended my participation in the mass when I could only honestly recite the first line. What I am saying here is scandalous but I do hope you will stick with me for I did not wish to become a heretic. I was living a naked intent unto God and my prayer was Thomas Huxley's “God give me strength to face a fact though it slay me.” I just wanted to find out the truth so I could build a solid foundation on a more accurate understanding of God. I honestly searched my soul, heart, and mind to see if the words of the Nicene Creed genuinely conveyed my experience and understanding of God:
We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen. Yes. I was a monotheist. My practice of the presence of God was with God. I had an as yet unschooled awareness that there were people who did not believe in a Creator God but I was Thomistic enough to find the Unmoved Mover argument logically persuasive. I experienced God as manifest in creation and as an invisible immanent presence.
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father; through him all things were made. This was a tough one. When I reflected on my fourteen years with God, I realized that my relationship was with God, not with Jesus, and not with the Holy Spirit. I had never really noticed that when I was all cuddled up in God's love. Who was Jesus to me? How had I experienced Jesus? Jesus was the very nice man who smiled upon me from my childhood crucifix to let me know that he did not want me to be burned alive. Jesus was the man who loved the little children and looked after the weak and stood up to the strong and walked with amazing courage and integrity as he lived out his great love for God. It was Jesus' example that I tried to follow in my interactions with others. It was Jesus' commitment to God that set the standard in its depth as he lived a gracious and caring life and died a painful and humiliating death on the cross out of his great love for God. I loved Jesus; yet, I did not experience Jesus as being the same as God. Now that I honestly searched my soul, I was forced to face the fact that I did not experience God as a trinity and that when I thought about it the trinity did not make much sense to me. It struck me as being a superfluously complicated idea with a lot of convoluted justifications that simply did not seem to be necessary to love God.
For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried. On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. You may find this odd for a female Catholic but I could never focus much energy on Mary. She seemed to be a bone that the Catholic Church threw to women to diffuse their anger over being left out of the priesthood and thereby the hierarchy. Since I had always experienced Jesus' humanness, a virgin conception was unnecessary and the Holy Spirit's impregnating Mary made me uncomfortable in a Leda and the Swan sort of way. The bigger issue here was atonement. Why would God send his son, also God, down to earth to suffer and die in order for God, who is somehow both God and Jesus, to allow us to be saved? Couldn't God just say “Humans, I forgive you.” Why would Jesus' death two thousand years ago save me from my sins today? Was I not responsible for myself? For that matter, why would Adam and Eve's sin have fallen upon me? I thought sons were not supposed to suffer for the sins of their fathers. Atonement made no sense to me and did not reflect the loving God with whom I had shared a longstanding relationship. My God did not express Himself through blood sacrifice.
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end. End times. Heaven and hell. What really seemed true to me? When my father took me to see The Late, Great Planet Earth, absolutely nothing resonated with me as true. Hal Lindsey's vision struck me as crazy, violent, and insulting to God. I did not recall the Catholic Church ever talking about end times in the Revelation's sense. The way I had worked it out was that when we died God would judge us based on how close we were to understanding and living out His will during our lives on earth. The closer we were to the mark, the less time we would spend in purgatory learning the lessons we missed. I figured that this happened on an individual basis so there would be a rolling admission into heaven rather than a grand single-time event. I had long discounted hell and I almost never thought about heaven. I certainly never entertained notions of a land flowing with milk and honey. I just assumed that we would be with God for eternity. Since I had practiced the presence of God, I extrapolated that experience minus the headaches that came with being on earth. What I could not comprehend was eternity and I nearly never tried. My relationship with God had nothing to do with carrots and sticks and had everything to do with love.
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 worshiped and glorified. He has spoken through the Prophets. As I mentioned earlier, I did not really experience God as a trinity but the trinity did provide me a framework for understanding God. I experienced God's transcendent goodness and fairness; God’s immanent availability as an inspiration and a sanctuary; and God’s call for us to incarnate His will through love, morality, good works, and social justice. I did not believe in prophets in the Old Testament predicting New Testament sort of way. The writers of the New Testament were familiar with the Old and used that knowledge to make more compelling their case before their Jewish audience. That seemed pretty obvious to me and a good strategy at that. I did believe that, even though God was equally available to us all, some people through their love of God, their pursuit of God, and their living out of God were closer to understanding God than others but these people were not special prophets sent by God. These were just people who chose to live their lives in a way that brought God's truth closer to the fore.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen. No, no, and maybe. Did I believe in one holy church? Absolutely not because it would be unfair for there to be one true path that was not equally available to all people in all locations in all times. I did not believe that the essential truths about God would be bound by time or geography which meant no prophets or incarnations unless there were bunches of them all over the place in all times. This also meant no one holy book that would be more available to some people than others. I did not believe that baptism was necessary for the forgiveness of sins but I thought it sure would help if you were sorry and sincerely intended to do better in the future.
According to doctrine, I was not a Roman Catholic.
