By Emily Mendez
Connecting Creed and Life
Editor’s Note: For 2025, the weekly Connecting Faith and Life column will be renamed Connecting Creed and Life. To celebrate the 2025 Jubilee Year and the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, the columns will consist of reflections on the Nicene Creed.
I have several friends who met their spouses using online dating websites. You put together a profile, a picture and some criteria for who you are searching for. When you read someone else’s profile, you get a sense of who they are and what they might be like. However, anyone who has used a dating website, even those who have met their future spouse, has many stories where meeting the person clarified that it was actually not the person for them. Knowing someone “on paper” (or a screen) is not the same as knowing someone in real life; a line that is often blurred in our technology-obsessed society.
As we connect Creed and Life during this Year of Jubilee and the 1,700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed, this is important for us to remember. The Nicene Creed gives us a wonderful theological profile of God. It tells us all about who God is and what he has done and is doing for us and what we have to look forward to. But all this is just words on a page if we do not encounter God himself. The creed helped define the Trinity and made clear what the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are and do. The Catechism guides us further saying, “The ultimate end of the whole divine economy is the entry of God’s creatures into the perfect unity of the Blessed Trinity” (CCC 260). By the grace of baptism, we are meant to share in the life of the Trinity.
I taught preparation for the Sacrament of Confirmation for many years, and I have talked a lot with people who do this important ministry. With a few exceptions, there are some common themes that always come up. Many students don’t regularly attend Mass. Parents drop them off but don’t take an active role in preparing for the sacrament. Some students are bored or uninterested. Some have had almost no education in the faith. There were always students who, despite being in high school, had not been to reconciliation since their first time in second grade. Even students who regularly attended Mass with their families might show up with arms crossed and eyes rolling like there is nothing left to teach them. Teens will pour their heart and soul into what they love and where they feel meaning and belonging, so what does this mean for the Church?
Don’t get me wrong, there are also students preparing for confirmation who are eager to learn, thirst to know God more, and are looking for how to listen to God’s will in their lives. But what is missing for too many students preparing and receiving confirmation (and many people in our parishes) is not better catechesis on the creed. Catechesis presupposes evangelization. What is missing is an encounter with God. We do not share in the life of the Blessed Trinity by reading about the characteristics of God on a piece of paper or in a textbook. We must encounter the person. We must fall in love. We must build a relationship with God in real life. The reason some teens preparing for confirmation are bored and unengaged is that they have not fallen in love with God.
So how do we introduce them? We bear witness to what we have seen and heard in our own lives. Imagine the difference in a class of teenagers if the parents and parishioners took turns each week giving a talk about how they have encountered God in their lives, how God’s love has changed them, and how they have listened to God’s will and tried to follow it. Our parishes desperately need people willing to tell their stories of encountering and falling in love with Jesus. This is the heart of the success of the retreats in our diocese that consistently bring people to relationship with Christ (Teens Encounter Christ, Cursillo, Welcome Weekend, etc.). People telling other people about their relationship and encounter with God is so powerful. Once they hear about it they will desire it and thirst to know God more. That’s when we teach the Creed. That’s when we begin to truly live the fruit of our baptism by sharing in the life of the Trinity. That’s when a real relationship with God starts.