**** PLEASE LOOK OVER THIS ONE! ****
- I believe in one God, Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth
- I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son our Lord
- Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary
- Suffered under Pontius Pilate: was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended into hell.
- The third day he rose from the dead
- He ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of the Father
- From there he shall judge the living and the dead.
- I believe in the Holy Spirit.
- —
- The forgiveness of sins
- The resurrection of the body
- And the life everlasting. Amen.
Geez. I can still hear the echoing of those monotonous voices in my ears. They were utterly zombie-like. Completely unenthused. No passion or interest in their words whatsoever. People in the Catholic Church didn’t declare themselves as followers of Jesus with joy, or even with quiet surrender, as though they really meant what they said. No. They declared themselves with boredom and detachment, like they were just going through the motions.
That’s how I characterize the Catholic Church. Its members perform the “proper” rituals and tasks, but they don’t always do them with God’s love and joy in their hearts. It isn’t really all about following Him and His plan, but about them and their plans for themselves. Neither were many Catholics I knew warmly welcoming, at least if you didn’t dress the right way or seem to have it all together. And many of my questions and doubts went unanswered and unchanged.
My faith shriveled and died at an early age. I hightailed it out of there as soon as I found my oh so intellectual escape route. I stayed away from faith for a while.
Then one day I met a guy and fell in love with him. Classic, right? The problem was that he was religious and I wasn’t. But I realized something important one day: our relationship, whatever it became, would never work out if one of us didn’t cave. And there was no way he was budging. So I decided, Okay. I’m going to try out religion again.
And it worked out.
The way his church did things was by being open and expressive. In addition to the awesome music, the hands and voices that were raised in glorious surrender, and the great messages, the members were always warm and friendly. They wanted to get to know you, and even if you came in a sweatshirt and jeans, they didn’t care. They said “Come as you are”, because that’s how God sees you, and they knew that they didn’t have a right to place limitations on who was allowed to come to Him. God is there for everyone, not just the people who seem like they have it all together.
So, because God’s people invited me in and I chose to stick around, I became devoted to God again. I’ve been saved. And now I actually believe in those wonderful things that the Apostles Creed says (all except one, that is). But now I declare them with true passion in my heart.
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Geez. I can still hear the echoing of those monotonous voices in my ears as the congregation says the Apostle’s Creed. Their voices were utterly zombie-like. Completely unenthused. No passion or interest in their words whatsoever. People in the Catholic Church didn’t declare themselves as followers of Jesus with joy, or even with quiet surrender, as though they really meant what they said. No. They declared themselves with boredom and detachment, like they were just going through the motions.
That’s how I characterize the Catholic Church. Its members perform the “proper” rituals and tasks, but they don’t always do them with God’s love and joy in their hearts. It isn’t really all about following Him and His plan, but about them and their plans for themselves. Neither were many Catholics I knew warmly welcoming, at least if you didn’t dress the right way or seem to have it all together. And many of my questions and doubts went unanswered and unchanged.
My faith shriveled and died at an early age. I hightailed it out of there as soon as I found my oh so intellectual escape route. I stayed away from faith for a while.
Then one day I met a guy and fell in love with him. Classic, right? The problem was that he was religious and I wasn’t. But I realized something important one day: our relationship, whatever it became, would never work out if one of us didn’t cave. And there was no way he was budging. So I decided, Okay. I’m going to try out religion again.
And it worked out.
The way his church did things was by being open and expressive. In addition to the awesome music, the hands and voices that were raised in glorious surrender, and the great messages, the members were always warm and friendly. They wanted to get to know you, and even if you came in a sweatshirt and jeans, they didn’t care. They said “Come as you are”, because that’s how God sees you, and they knew that they didn’t have a right to place limitations on who was allowed to come to Him. God is there for everyone, not just the people who seem like they have it all together.
So, because God’s people invited me in and I chose to stick around, I became devoted to God again. I’ve been saved. And now I actually believe in those wonderful things that the Apostles Creed says (all except one, that is). But now I declare them with true passion in my heart.
So, I have mixed feelings about your “This I believe” declaration. On one hand, I like that your broke the traditional format and put it at the beginning. More than that, I like that it’s in someone else’s ‘voice.’ I think thats clever and I enjoyed it. On the other hand, I feel like you don’t leave the reader with enough of a walk away moral. I think these things are generally supposed to end with a light, positive affirmation of a common/popular belief that I can walk away with and feel good. Not that yours wasn’t sad, but, it felt more like a factual statement than anything else: “I believe in Christianity.” I’d recommend thinking of ways to make the ending a little bit more generalizable.
I also agree with Kris’ point that you should specify which one you don’t agree with, or scrap the line altogether.
I also disliked the lines, “That’s how I characterize the Catholic Church. Its members perform the “proper” rituals and tasks, but they don’t always do them with God’s love and joy in their hearts.” I think it would be better to say, “in my church…” rather than talk about the Catholic Church as a whole.
This is really nicely put. I like the casual yet smart tone of it, it is a good piece of writing. I think you need to be careful in anything you write about religion considering how subjective and opinion invoking the topic is. In the beginning you do a great job of creating a scene that a lot of people can relate too. Keep that up throughout the story, because a lot of people do not know specific bible terms and you risk losing some readers/listeners. Nicely written, though. I like the theme of the importance of passion regarding religion.
Carly,
I’m generally a bigger fan of your first post, so I’m glad that you seem to be as well.
One of the complexities that this arrangement will offer, though, is how to mark a distinction between the Apostles’ Creed section at the beginning and the start of your own words. You may want to think about speaking in a considerably different tone, using some sort of Garageband voice distortion, or having someone else (or maybe even a group of voices) speak those words.
Another difficulty that you’ll face (though I’m very confident that you’ll overcome it) is how to avoid “sermonizing” here–which is one of the things that the This I Believe prompt (http://thisibelieve.org/guidelines/) asks you to do. You’ll need to find a way to talk about religion without making this thing feel too much like a rigorous, scriptural argument.
One way to do that would be to play up more of the narrative aspects of this essay and downplay its explanatory areas. Right now it’s probably 30% narrative and 70% exposition. Maybe try to get that to 50-50 or even 70-30 in the opposite direction.
If you think that the parallelism makes sense, you might also consider doing something more with this sentence: “My faith shriveled and died at an early age.” You talk about spiritual death here, but there’s not an explicit reference to spiritual resurrection. The words from Romans, “We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life” and “Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him” come to mind, though.
As a final note, I’m not crazy about this sentence: “And now I actually believe in those wonderful things that the Apostles Creed says (all except one, that is).” Unless you’re going to explain which “one” you’re referring to, that parenthetical statement is a bit too distracting. For what it’s worth, I’m not necessarily sure that there’s anything–except Christ descending into Hell–that’s particularly controversial here. (Actually, I guess the resurrection of the body is pretty controversial, too, on second thought.) So, if you’re unsure about those aspects, cool. If it’s another one, maybe we should have a talk that has less to do with essay writing and more to do with scriptural interpretations, just to put my mind at ease.
If you’ve got any questions or thoughts, I’d be glad to hear them.