Creeds

My spiritual practice,
My meditation prompt,
Is to write a creed.

They never begin I Believe, but
I Belove, I Trust, I give my heart.

When I try to look into the face of the Eternal,
What I find is never the rugged,
Barren, unchanging mountaintop
Of the Nicene Creed.

What I find, staring back at me,
Is the sky: changing
Hour by hour, day by day,
Season by season.
Or the sea: calm and wild,
Dangerous and necessary.

I belong to a church that says
The Nicene Creed on Sunday morning.
I say it with my fingers crossed.
I suspect I’m not the only one.

The church teaches that a common creed
Unites us; a shared foundation,
Certainty upon which we can build.

Perhaps.

But what would a church be liked
That starts from our own meditations,
Our own experiences,
Our own uncertainties?

And gathers, provisionally, raggedly,
What we believe, what we belove,
What we trust, where we give our hearts
Into something we can together say,
And sing, and mean,
And perhaps even live
With no reservations,
No footnotes,
No fingers crossed behind our backs.

November 2024