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Coffee With Sister Vassa
PRAYING THE CREED
“I believe in God, the Father almighty…” (Beginning of the Apostles’ Creed)
I once read in an interview with the late John McCain, the U.S. senator from Arizona, that he scratched these seven words from the beginning of “The Apostles’ Creed” on a wall of his tiny cell in Vietnam, where he was imprisoned and tortured for over five years. These words, this profession of faith in “God, the Father almighty,” were an important part of what kept him going in a life-threatening situation.
How many of us really pray the Creed, – either this one, or the Nicene-Constantinopolitan one, more commonly used in our Orthodox Church, – and recognize its life-sustaining power, in the face of fear? Few of us have the experience of a John McCain, but many of us know the prison that is fear, which envelops us so easily when we abandon faith.
I’m reminded today that we have very powerful, life-affirming tools in our Tradition, like the Creed, which can lift us out of fear and re-connect us with Life. “I believe in one God, the Father almighty, Maker of all things, visible and invisible,” I say today, from the bottom of my heart, as so many have said before me, and also say with me today, amidst their fears and worries. I need not be alone in any prison today, because I can re-connect with the Triune God and others, in what is greater and beyond the walls of any prison-cell, which is faith in Him. It is also hope. It’s hope in the new life He can bring us daily through the cross-carrying Way: “I look for the resurrection of the dead,” which happens daily when we rise after our falls, “and the life of the age to come,”which is always coming, and occasionally breaking into even the darkest of our places.
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In 2025, we will celebrate the 1700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed (325-2025). That means that The Creed has real "staying power," as a concise statement of the Church's universal and timeless Faith. Actually, the Creed was completed at the Second Ecumenical Council in 381, but the basis of the Creed was established in Nicea in 325, when the great breakthrough in theological terminology strengthened the Church's claim to the co-eternal status of the Son in His relationship with the Father within the life of the Trinity. And that term was homoousios ("of one [identical] essence") We will spend a good time next year reviewing the Nicene Creed in honor of that anniversary.
I am glad that Sister Vassa turned to the late Senator John McCain as the image of a true hero who withstood the horrors of being a prisoner during the Vietnam War. I did not know this deeply-moving fact about his use of the opening of the Apostle's Creed as a statement of personal faith that sustained him during that most trying of times. John McCain returned to public life as a very honorable and respected political figure. He was an image of political integrity throughout his long career.
