Please note: I know I can’t draw but I wanted to show what I meant. I never let children tell me they “can’t draw”, as I think we express something even if it isn’t a beautiful product. So try to see it as a child’s drawing. When I can draw it better I will change the picture
New year, new me and all that and I thought about how I began by writing a creed and had meant to write a new one from time to time- not necessarily to reject the old (though I would be allowed to outgrow it if it happened) but to keep trying to articulate to myself what I believe and what all this is about. So it would be time to write a new one.
Then I have been reading “New Feminist Christianity” and whenever I read things theological I feel a stirring to write it and preach it. I thirst to be a priest but at least I have my blog and a couple of side projects. And finally I have been watching “Call the Midwife” aided and abetted by my youngest son who bought me season 3 for Christmas. I have a love/hate relationship with the series but in all honesty more love for it’s emotional directness, themes of love, laughter and women’s friendship as well as birth and sometimes suffering and grief. Also I am a sucker for women’s history ESPECIALLY when they show it with nice frocks and hairstyles.
So then when I go to write a “creed” I have been affected by these influences of all the feminist theologians telling me to get over the kyriearchy (I agree) while Jenny Lee (a fictional midwife) reminds me every episode that the centre of life is love. And I think that my new “creed” will be not so much an “I believe” statement but more of an “I eperience love” statement which is more to the point. I often think about who and how I love and as an examination of conscience this is the right focus. But a creed is even more basic than that. A creed is not about me and how I am, it is about the reality around me. How do I experience and access being loved. When I finally realised I was loved and lovable, when I was 35 it changed my life. Up until then I had wanted to be lovable but had never believed it was possible. Once I was healed of my inability to know myself I became aware of love from a lot of different people and real love (not just grudging duty-love) from God.
So my transformed, liberated “creed” is an “I am loved” statement. Knowing and experiencing are ways of “believing” I suppose but without that rationalising and legalistic edge. Here is my attempt then:
As we awaken in the womb of God,
quicken in the depths of her who conceived us,
Jesus, our midwife reaches
to hold and steady us
on our terrifying journey.
Feeling squashed and stretched,
helpless and falling
Jesus takes and wraps us
to bring our newly born selves
back into the arms of the Mother.
The cord may be cut
but the milk flows.
The Spirit confronts us in the mirror.
We trace our ancestry:
the deepest reality of the universe
beating in each breast.
Beloved child, allowed to grow and choose
but never a stranger
from the arms of our Mother.
