May 20

May 20 marks the day that the first Ecumenical Council of Nicaea began meeting, in 325. Emperor Constantine called this council to get various church authorities to agree on certain doctrines. The Nicene Creed was one of the documents produced by this council, which has gone through several revisions.

Today is also the feast day of Columba of Rieti, a religious sister whose mystical visions and devotion to the poor made her a beloved figure in her region. She was one of many saints who, I suspect, had obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and anorexia, which led her to practice “mortification of the flesh” by fasting too much (which would ultimately kill her) and wearing hair shirts, among other things. I do not include her in my list of saints for these practices, which I think are unhealthy behaviors rooted in anxiety and toxic theology, but because she irritated the right people. She had no problem telling the Pope to repent, and she bothered Lucrezia Borgia so much that Borgia accused her of witchcraft. As a young woman, when her parents arranged a marriage for her, she cut off her hair in protest and sent it to her fiancé. She’s an example of a sensitive soul with a spine of steel—some of the qualities of a saint that I admire.

Reflection:

After my work with clients with obsessive-compulsive disorder, my hunch is that a lot of saints had OCD. Martin Luther and John Wesley both had symptoms of it, I’m sure. Joseph Ciarrocchi’s book The Doubting Disease describes the way leaders of monastic communities sometimes had to restrain the frequency of a religious brother or sister’s confessions, and as Roberta Bondi says in To Love as God Loves, they warned people against aspiring to “heroic faith.” But I also want to resist pathologizing religious asceticism and the reasoning behind the theology of “mortification of the flesh.” People meditate in the snow or train for marathons and we consider such behavior normal. It’s when such behavior interferes with school or work, relationship, or health that it becomes a “disorder.” Columba of Reiti had an eating disorder. I wonder, if she could have been saved from it, what else could she have accomplished?

As for Nicaea: I no longer read creeds the way I used to. They are not mere litmus tests for orthodoxy. These are declarations of faith worked out by communities, and they reflect the theological controversies of the times. Their poetry can be sublime: “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made.”

With my analytical brain on, I read them with these questions in my mind: What was at stake? How much struggle did this group go through to land on these words? What would have been the consequence if a group of our faith ancestors decided to use different language? 

But then I read them again with my analytical brain quiet, and hear them as poetry.

Prayer: God, our brains understand only the tiniest, intelligible part of you. Help our faith to go deeper than words. Amen.