petalridge.com

A CREDO

 

One assignment I liked to give as a Creative Writing instructor was the credo essay. It was a tough one for most young writers, but I wanted them to think about what they stood for, and to permit whatever courage they had in their convictions to seep, sometimes, into their writing. When I was a bit older than they were I had written my own credo essay. For a while kept it pinned on my teacher alcove corkboard. Fishing it out recently, I could still recognize my voice in it, and still hope that it represented me. It's a bit nobler, more idealistic, honestly, than I have become since; I toned one passage down a bit when preparing it for my website. In a few places, I amplified the original, to improve the clarity, knowing what I meant then and feeling the urge to mansplain for my young self. Who forty plus years ago had this to say:

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                                            NOTES TOWARDS A CREED

 

                        “I’m kind of a mystic. I believe in a kind of mist.”

                         —how I’ve usually filled in the “religion” blank on official forms

 

I believe in the great spirit from which we came, and to which we will return. I believe that however and however much we touch here, there we will commingle, like water. I believe neither in individual salvation nor in individual perdition, nor yet in individual survival; only that when death takes us, as a collective mist—as souls, if you wish—we must confront all three potentialities, salvation, survival, perdition. Even as in life we have, as a collective mass, of body, flesh, blood, and bone, caught up into breath, and being.

 

I believe that everything that lives on this earth, animal, vegetable, or mineral, is in a small or a smaller way part of that collective mist. Therefore I believe that to reach out and give succor to everything that lives is divine.

 

I believe that to seek scrupulously to understand is divine, that to love honestly is divine, that to learn fiercely is divine, that to sing passionately is divine, that to dance, plant, build, play, write, paint, and in all ways to create and recreate, are essential styles of praise, and that to praise and mean it, aspiring to do so in full-hearted fidelity to our unique and temporal selves, is divine.

 

I believe in the conscience, which I take to be a heightened form of consciousness. I believe that every offense against it is a small self-death; that every act in support of it is a breath of life; and that caring, committed, honorably informed people may with integrity disagree about which, for them, is which. For knowing, loving, living are not stasis but process, which depends for its health on diverse ways of seeing and feeling; on the holy and perishable individual.

 

I believe in openness to that diversity. That the naïve person is lither and more muscular than the cynic, more posed to enrich the process. I suggest that while hatred of others because of their simple otherness is blatantly pernicious, there exist subtler defeats of the spirit, which ultimately are no less noxious. For each movement of the soul breeds in our neighbor a small, mirroring movement; and simple mistrust, for example, even where it is apparently, from our innocent perspective, surely warranted, may not be; and mirroring mistrust can kill us as virulently as misplaced confidence. It is right and proper to protect the unique and perishable self from premature engulfment in the whole; but the price is not one we should consider pragmatic, or petty, or pleasurable to pay.

 

I believe that all religious worship that reaches up and out is holy, unless it be a reaching up with knives, guns, bombs, and the like, framing God for our own murderousness; or a reaching out with violence of spirit, with the venomous tongue, carving out the holy ground in our own name. For sectarians are spirit profiteers, and to consider ourselves elect, or more chosen than thou, is in fact to cast ourselves out of the collective spirit.

 

I believe that personally, individually, we have nothing to gain from our good acts, other than for their own sake, other than in obeisance to our conscience. I believe that there is no manner in which we can ensure our personal survival after death, neither at the expense of nor with the cooperation of others; and that this is the deepest freedom that we have.

 

For finally I believe that while it is from the great spirit that we came, and while it is there that we will return, and commingle, it is only here, now, that we may make a difference.

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