Yesterday was the third meeting at the University of St. Thomas of the Fall reflection series on the creed I am offering at UST, at St. John’s Episcopal and at St. Hubert this fall. Our focus this week is on the second part of the creed, in which we express our faith in Jesus Christ.
What we, as Christians, fundamentally affirm here is the reality that we encounter God in and through Jesus Christ. That doesn’t mean exclusively through Jesus – it doesn’t mean there are not other ways we encounter God. Many of us encounter God in nature, in music, in poetry, in all sorts of other ways. BUT, however else we encounter God, the focal point of our encounter with the divine is Jesus Christ. When we meet Jesus, we are face to face with God.
During this past week, the participants prayed with reflections by a number of spiritual writers on this part of the creed. We began the sessions (as we usually do) by giving the participants time to share in small groups a little bit about their prayer experience during this past week.
After the sharing, my colleague Jennifer Wright shared some reflections on what this portion of the creed says to her. Part of her focus was on the ways in which this portion of the Creed elaborate on both Jesus’ humanity and his divinity. (She used the whiteboard to illustrate and I attempted to recreate her attempt to illustrate her talk, which you can find here.) Her talk gave me much to think about and I suspect I’ll post some more about it sometime in the next several days.
This week, you get two podcasts for the price of one. You can stream the podcast of both the talk Jennifer gave yesterday and the one I gave at St. John’s Episcopal this past Sunday. You can also download the talks here (Jennifer’s talk, which runs for 14:37) and here (my talk, which runs for 17:14). You can find a copy of the prayer material the participants will pray with this week here.
Jennifer’s talk:
My talk:
Creo en Dios! 