The first word of the creed is “I,” the person who has been united to Christ to be at the center of the human drama. To say the creed awakens our senses towards the wondrous exchange of the divine and the human, to the merciful tenderness of God. Life is not a tragedy but a romantic comedy.
“I believe.” In the book The Impostor, Georges Bernanos writes a story of a scholar priest hearing a confession from a columnist of a newspaper. The writer went to this priest many times for confession. The priest, after hearing another confession about the writer’s sensuality, said, “I’ve listened to you many times, in this same place, with one question on my lips: Do you think, then, that you are alive?” To give a decisive “yes” to this question is to embrace the life God has embraced.
in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth.
We are children. “A kid's got plenty of troubles, like everybody else, and he's really so very helpless, quite unarmed against pain and illness. Childhood and old age should be the two greatest trials of mankind. But that very sense of powerlessness is the mainspring of a child's joy. He just leaves it all to his mother, you see. Present, past, future--his whole life is caught up in one look, and that look is a smile.” (Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest)
I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord.
"...we must realize that between the human and the divine there is the distance of ever greater dissimilitude. Distance is not the same thing as an alienating gulf. If a word of Jesus seemed close to us, familiar, while at the same time we were afraid that its divine meaning remained alien and unintelligible, Jesus would not be the Word and the revelation of God. When he weeps over Jerusalem, we understand, from a human point of view, the human sorrow he expresses. But in faith, we also understand that God, in his eternal mystery, could not have found a clearer way of expressing his attitude to the Jerusalem of the day than in these tears of unrequitted love. He weeps these tears so that we may grow nearer to the heart of God. The more unreserved the human heart is in preparing itself in faith and love to receive the revelation of the divine mystery, the most lastingly it will be penetrated and taken possession of by the actual divine meaning." (Hans Urs von Balthasar, Truth is Symphonic: Aspects of Christian Pluralism, Ignatius Press 1987 pg. 33)
He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary.
"Amor and Psyche. A young woman falls in love with an unknown man and for years does not cease longing for him. One dark night he comes and unites himself to her. "May I look upon you?" "Our son will be the mirror in which you will see me." And what if this invisible nocturnal lover should be a god--should be God himself?" (Hans Urs von Balthasar)
He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.
“He came down to earth out of compassion for the human race, feeling our sufferings even before he suffered on the cross and decided to assume our flesh. For if he had not suffered, he would not have come to live on the level of human life. First he suffered, then descended and became visible. What is this suffering which he suffered for us? It is the suffering of love…Don’t you know when he directs human affairs he suffers human suffering?...Therefore God bears our ways just as the Son of God bears our sufferings. The very Father is not without suffering. When he is prayed to, he has pity and compassion; he suffers something of love and puts himself in the place of those with whom he, in the view of the greatness of his nature, cannot be.” (Origen, Homily on Ezekiel 6, 6)
He descended into hell.
"Look, then, to what you have been reduced, and see to what extremity your mercy has left itself be led by your justice! Neither the angels nor your Father's arms nor the breast of the Trinity were able to restrain you. On the very brink of this act by which all things exist, he found no way to defend himself from the shaft of Love!" (Paul Claudel, Poete, 144)
On the third day he rose again.
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
--John Donne, Holy Sonnet #72
He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
"Christ is now exalted above the heavens, but he still suffers on earth all the pain that we, the members of his body, have to bear. He showed this when he cried out from above: Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? and when he said: I was hungry and you gave me food. Why do we on earth not strive to find rest with him in heaven even now, through the faith, hope and love that unites us to him? While in heaven he is also with us; and we while on earth are with him. He is here with us by his divinity, his power and his love. We cannot be in heaven, as he is on earth, by divinity, but in him, we can be there by love." (St. Augustine, Homily on the Feast of Ascension)
He will come again to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
"Saint Paul writes: As we behold the glory of the Lord with unveiled faces, that glory, which comes from the Lord who is the Spirit, transforms us all into his own likeness, from one degree of glory to another. Does this not show that the Spirit changes those in whom he comes to dwell and alters the whole pattern of their lives? With the Spirit within them it is quite natural for people who had been absorbed by the things of this world to become entirely other-worldly in outlook, and for cowards to become men of great courage. There can be no doubt that this is what happened to the disciples. The strength they received from the Spirit enabled them to hold firmly to the love of Christ, facing the violence of their persecutors unafraid. Very true, then, was our Saviour’s saying that it was to their advantage for him to return to heaven: his return was the time appointed for the descent of the Holy Spirit." (St. Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on the Gospel of John)
the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints,
The Church’s obligation is to win the people not by necessarily giving every demonstration for her doctrines, but proposing a life to those who wants more in life. She proclaims a presence and she understands that many won’t understand, that many won’t be convinced, and that many would want more evidences. A lot of people will think she is crazy, that she is drunk, that she is speaking nonsense. But the Church holds fast to Christ and proclaims that she is more than her doctrines and that her doctrines are reasonable not because it is reduced to logical analysis or historical evidences, but because it encompasses every aspect of human life. Sometimes she is silent and sometimes she will disappoint you because she does not give you the evidence you want. “What is truth?” Yet, even in this silence we cannot ignore the fact that in the Church there are people who are filled with joy that no one can take away from them. So the Church says, “Look deeper,” to throw one’s nets out and you will find that you will meet people in the midst of the barbarity in the Church and in the world who will give you the hope that sustains every instant. The Magisterium may be useless, but a useless servant she is; it is what Christ expects. You will find in life that not a lot of people will be convinced of your reasons for being a Christian and that doesn’t matter. What matters is that you are a presence, that you proclaim a presence, and that is enough. If somehow they see the truth, this is not of your own doing but the superabundance of grace.
the forgiveness of sins,
"In the almost total silence that weighed on the beach, Jesus, lying down, looked at the man next to Him, who was Simon Peter; He stared at him, and Peter felt, we can imagine how he felt, the weight of that gaze, because he remembered his betrayal of a few weeks earlier, and of everything that he had done—he had even been called Satan by Christ: “Get behind me, Satan, you are a stumbling block for me, for the destiny of my life”—he remembered all his faults, because when you make a terrible mistake in your life, you remember all the other things you have done, even those that are not so terrible. Peter felt like he was crushed by the weight of his incapacity, his inability to be a man. And that man next to him opened His mouth and said: “Simon [imagine how Simon must have been trembling], do you love me?” But, if you try to put yourselves in this situation, you will tremble now thinking about it, just thinking about it, thinking about this scene that was so dramatic; dramatic because it is so descriptive of what is human, showing what is human, exalting what is human, because drama is what exalts the human element; only tragedy annihilates it. Nihilism leads to tragedy; the encounter with Christ brings drama into your life, because drama is the relationship lived between an ‘I’ and a ‘you’. Then, like a sigh, like a sigh Peter answered. His response was barely hinted, like a sigh. He didn’t dare, but... “I don’t know how, yes, Lord, I love you; I don’t know how, but that’s how it is.” “Yes, Lord. I don’t know how, I can’t tell you how, but...” (Luigi Giussani, "Recognizing Christ")
the resurrection of the body,
"But the point is that Christ's resurrection is something more, something different. If we may borrow the language of the theory of evolution, it is the greatest "mutation," absolutely the most crucial leap into a totally new dimension that there has ever been in the long history of life and its development: a leap into a completely new order which does concern us, and concerns the whole of history...My "I" is taken away from me and is incorporated into a new and greater subject. This means that my "I" is back again, but now transformed, broken up, opened through incorporation into the other, in whom it acquires its new breadth of existence. Paul explains the same thing to us once again from another angle when, in chapter three of the Letter to the Galatians, he speaks of the "promise," saying that it was given to an individual -- to one person: to Christ. He alone carries within himself the whole "promise." But what then happens with us? Paul answers: You have become one in Christ (cf. Galatians 3:28). Not just one thing, but one, one only, one single new subject.This liberation of our "I" from its isolation, this finding oneself in a new subject means finding oneself within the vastness of God and being drawn into a life which has now moved out of the context of "dying and becoming." The great explosion of the Resurrection has seized us in baptism so as to draw us on. Thus we are associated with a new dimension of life into which, amid the tribulations of our day, we are already in some way introduced. To live one's own life as a continual entry into this open space: This is the meaning of being baptized, of being Christian. This is the joy of the Easter Vigil." (Pope Benedict XVI, Easter Virgil Homily 2006)
and the life everlasting.
Eternal life is the life that we want, that our experiences of happiness never end. We dream to become a god, to have the luxury of eternal freedom and never ending happiness. We look up to the skies and see how astronomically big it is and we often wonder where our place is in this vast universe. In a humble way, a man then comes up to us and says, “What are you looking for? Follow me!” We experience the impact of the Meteor, the Word-made-flesh, in a serene and humble way. We look back, we remember, and we understand how this Meteor has impacted our lives, how our sins and failures are shattered and yet, our dreams of becoming happy are never destroyed; they are fulfilled.When we look into our lives, we understand the many wounds we have acquired. What we need is a purification of memory, judging the past within the context of the meteoric love of Christ. Once we remember our experiences of Christ, the wounds become glorious. We understand that to love Christ means to be conquered, to be wounded by the love and beauty of Christ.
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