When we do something week after week, month after month, year after year, it becomes easy to do it automatically. For much of what we do in our daily lives, this is good. None of us would become a good driver if we had to constantly think about every little thing we do, just as we did when we first learned how to drive. Likewise, our jobs would take much longer, if not become impossible to complete, if we had to think in detail about every little task that we perform on a daily basis.
There are areas in which this tendency can be a problem, such as our participation in the Mass. How often do we really pay close attention to what we’re saying and doing on any given Sunday? For many of us, if not most of us, our words and actions are done automatically, with out much thought given to what we’re saying and doing, and why we do them. Today, on this Trinity Sunday, we need to take a couple minutes to look at that part of the Mass when we profess our faith in the God Who is one God, three divine persons: the Nicene Creed.
Every Sunday, following the homily, we are asked by the Church to state publicly what we believe as Catholics to have been revealed by God about Himself. We call this statement of faith a “creed” from the first word in Latin: credo, which translates as “I believe”. The Creed we recite every Sunday, the Nicene Creed, was first formulated by the Council of Nicea in 325 to combat a heresy that denied the divinity and eternal nature of Christ. It was later added to by the councils of Constantinople and Chalcedon in order to clarify what has been revealed about Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.
We need to realize that when we recite this Creed which has been passed down to us from the earliest centuries of the Church, we take on for ourselves as our belief what the Church declares regarding God and our relationship to Him. This may not be clear due to the current translation of the Mass starting the Nicene Creed with “We believe”, but the upcoming revised translation will correctly use “I believe”. By using “I believe”, it becomes clear that each of us as individuals join together as members of the Body of Christ to proclaim and accept the teachings of the Church. It also becomes clear that we individually accept and vow to live by these beliefs. This is not something we should take lightly, but should seriously consider the words of the Creed and what it declares. What we believe about God affects how we relate to Him, and His importance in how we live our daily lives.
With the new translation of the Mass coming out in November of 2011, we will have the opportunity to once again pay close attention to the meaning behind what we say in the celebration of Holy Mass. Of course, we don’t need to wait until then to pull ourselves out of auto-pilot, but can focus on the words of the Creed now. The new translation will not change the meaning of what we’re saying, but it will use far more clear and specific language to help us understand the deeper meaning behind our words.
The challenge for us this Sunday, and every Sunday, is to take seriously the Nicene Creed. Each of us individually needs to make these more than just words we recite every Sunday. Instead, we need to reflect on them, pray about them, dig deeper into them, and make them words that will influence how we live our lives. If we truly believe what we profess every Sunday, it would be impossible for them not to have an effect on us.
Now, as we recite the Nicene Creed and profess our faith in the Trinity which we celebrate this Sunday, may the “we believe” we profess be echoed within our hearts as “I believe”.
