My Own IGNATIAN CREED

(This is an exercise I did during my spiritual direction after examining the Ignatian creed that is part of the Ignatian adventure. Due to my struggle with fundamentalist legalism I needed to find a way to look at it outside the regular language of religion – to try and come to it outside of a focus on words like sin or behaviour. It’s a bit more formal than my usual and I had to repeat words a few times to fight the encroachment of accusation and despair. There are two bonfires that Jesus lit in my life to draw me through the valleys – one is the light of who God is – and the other is the light of who I am. It is meant to be read slowly.)

There is a Being – who exists as invisible mystery – who is all that is: Good. True. Beauty. Life… and these characteristics are held up and built upon the most essential – Love.

The make up of this Being is in essence relational. Meaning a movement of connection. As Kierkegaard says: love itself is a continual movement flowing both outwards from God’s self and back inwards – an eternal (outside of time) uninterrupted loop that never reaches its end and is always multiplying itself.

I was made to be loved by this being – Jesus, Spirit, and Yahweh; (the 3 in one). Period.

And since love is continually moving outwards at the same time as inwards, being loved creates a loving in response, a spring that flows back to God and onwards to the one created next to me.

As Life, this Being gifts me with it. I was designed to find and explore the characteristics of this Being’s essence that exist both around me and in me and make my creation possible. As a creator, this Being continually does new things – discovery and growth are gifts from them to me. This Love left clues, pieces of God’s self and God’s heart and works of God’s art all through the cosmos to draw me onward and into the Trinity.

This Trinity of relationship used their essence to knit me into being, which means I have access always to love, beauty, good, truth, and life as the yarn that loops between us.

Because I am made small and treasured and unique; a blended physical and spiritual being created to experience, explore and grow… while being tucked in to the Trinity’s self… I only know in part, and am limited in vision and am not meant to exist without Yahweh.

In this state of adventure and being created, there are things along my path that I can mistake as myself OR mistake as a path to freedom. Like the desire for surcease from self (addiction). Or, on the contrary, the drive towards protection of self (eg0) in the experience of pain. As I am walking this adventure in community with others like myself with limited vision, these things can expand and compound between us, causing injury, creating shadows of doubt to make me question God’s presence, sometimes obscuring those essential characteristics of Love that Jesus wants to draw me into.

All of God’s essence makes the Trinity value freedom, and Jesus will not force or dominate, so I and those around me have always the choice to look to or away from him. What direction I choose to turn my gaze has natural consequences. As knit to God I was never meant to handle the mystery of finding them, of living and finding my created identity by myself on my own power. When I try to snip the threads that tie me to Yahweh, out of a mistaken need for control – out of surcease of self; or protection of ego against other creatures; or due to a misunderstanding of God’s essence – Jesus is what draws me back, through the Spirit, illuminating the dark I’m wandering into and tugging those innermost threads he knit between him and I, lighting up a beacon of Yahweh’s essence to invite me to turn my gaze back and find again my intended state of being loved by them.

As relational Good, Love, Truth, Beauty and Life, the Trinity in concert will never let the ties to them be severed. I am never in danger of losing my soul because it only exists through them, it is knit to them and they are faithful beyond time.

Knowing my limits, the Trinity created a fail-safe through Jesus and what he does for me, in Holy Spirit’s presence, to keep me knit into the eternity that Yahweh is. My life is fuller and brighter and more anchored to hope when I allow myself to be loved by the Trinity and to fall in love with this Person in response. It is inside that love loop, being loved and loving in response that I am most at home, most safe, being filled and completed into the being Yahweh meant me to be.