We had a baptism today at church. While always a delightful event, this involves one bit of Episcopal common worship with which I have quite a lot of difficulty -- we had to recite the "I believe" form of the Apostle's Creed.
I don't have any problem reciting the "We believe" form of the creed -- good since we do it almost every week. I feel fully a part of a Church that has used this creed to describe our common faith for centuries. It is a statement of Christian doctrine that has held us together as a people: that we have believed, that we do believe, and that we will believe at least until such time as the Church jointly revises the statement to reflect some future common understanding of our faith. I value it and ponder it: what does it mean when we say "he ascended into heaven"? In another day, "heaven" meant the dome of the sky and/or the universe as it appears in the night sky, while today "heaven" connotes something much different. How do we understand the word "virgin"? Do we all believe, and have we always believed, that Mary conceived Jesus without engaging in sex? Or, was she a young girl, innocent of having done wrong, willing to be vulnerable in the service of her God? Can I "get away" with believing that? (My mom thought not! One of our few really tense discussions about faith...) What is "life everlasting" and does it happen now, or at some time in the future? I can assert the creed as our common faith declaration and still entertain all these questions without feeling like I have lost my anchor.
I have a lot more problem when the creed gets up close and personal in the "I believe" form. Sometimes I don't recite it at all, because I'm not sure I do believe it. I'm positive I don't believe what some people believe, not sure that I believe enough to even be considered a good Anglican (and that's really saying something, since in general it's perfectly fine for Anglicans to be all over the map on matters of theology). At the same time, I can't say that I don't believe it, or even any part of it. I'm just not sure how I believe it. Take the "resurrection of the body and the life everlasting" bits. I can't find it possible to have hope of there being anything waiting to be discovered after I die. I tend to believe -- perhaps more with the typical Jew than with my own coreligionists? I am not sure why this should be -- that the purpose of religion, of God, of salvation and redemption, is in the here and now, the life of the community, the finding of meaning in the human condition, and in the healing of the world. I feel like the love that we give, the contributions we make, the people we help to grow into their own maturity and contributions -- all those live through us and after us as a kind of eternal (or at least until the end of the human era) life. Today's Gospel (Luke 20) talks about God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as "the God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive." (vs. 38). Are they living on some "other plane of reality" as physical beings in heaven? Or do they live -- really live, truly alive for us -- in our collective understanding of their stories and how we have incorporated them into everything we are and aspire to be as a people? To me, it's the latter, and to me the latter is so much more powerful an idea, so much more real. Whether that is enough or not, it is all I can find myself able to believe about eternal life.
The closest I can come to an idea of a "resurrection of the body" is a conviction that the dual concept of spirit vs. body isn't quite "it." That idea is too closely associated with the belief that body is bad, to be resisted or denied, and that spirit is good only in the measure that it is pure and disembodied. I am more of a panentheist -- I believe that God is the source of as well as a part of, actually the very essence of, every part of nature; so that the very molecules that are my body are also eternally of God or animated by God. Earlier in this blog I wrote about how, with the constant recycling of our molecules, we and those we love are "uniquely, separately ourselves, and we are unimaginably, inextricably entangled." In reality, the physical I that I am today is not the same I that I was yesterday or that I will be tomorrow -- I, the physical reality, am constantly changing, morphing into something new, and I , or the bits of matter that currently make up the I that I am today, will someday be someone or something quite other. Perhaps we shall eventually all return to be incorporated back into the God that is the source of all and yet beyond all, creator and sustainer of all, eternal inhabitant of timeless time and spaceless space. Is this the resurrection of the body? All I know is that, when I took my beloved Butte, hopelessly ill cat companion of nearly 14 years, to be euthanized this week, I leaned in and breathed in her last breath -- wanting to keep her with me, incorporate who she has been to me into my own molecular structure.
We do our best. All the theology in the world, and all the pondering of what it means and if I can believe it -- it's all inadequate when we stand naked to the reality of love and loss. Thank God for poets, who sometimes manage to put into words those things that, nevertheless, cannot be said in words:
...remembering
Again the loss of you who stayed long
Enough to enrage my heart, short enough
To sound it with natural laments of you*
--- AnnBarbie
* Raficq Abdulla, private communication (Nov 11, 2010)
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