Well done on positively shouting “I believe” last week when you recited the Creed at Sunday Mass. I could almost hear you all the way over here.
Today we will move forward a little into the Nicene Creed to a phrase that always gives me goosebumps when I think about it. It’s, “All things visible and invisible.”
God created all things. ALL things.
This includes things that I can see, but you can’t. And things that you can see, but I can’t.
And things that neither of us can see unless we get some help from an electron microscope or the James Webb Telescope.
You need an electron microscope to see a virus, or an atom.
You can also see an amazing little thing called a phage that looks like it landed here from another planet. They’re a type of virus that we can use to target and kill bad bacteria.
Our ancestors could always see the moon and the stars if it was a clear night, but they could only guess at what was really up there.
With the help of the James Webb Telescope, we can now see stupendous galaxies and black holes that we couldn’t see before, even with the Hubble Telescope.
This means that all these were “things invisible” for our ancestors, but they’re not invisible for us.
Even so, there are still plenty of things in the world that remain invisible. For example, I can’t see you right now, but I know you exist.
Then there are the angels, who are very present in our lives but who are mostly invisible to us.
We can’t see the beating heart of Jesus in the host at Mass, but it’s there nonetheless.
There’s the human soul. There’s also the mind, the consciousness, the intellect, the emotions, and the will, all of which we can’t see either.
We can feel them inside us and see their effects on our faces and in our lives—but we can’t see them as actual things.
This might prompt you to pray for all the people you know who suffer from mental disorders—again, something we usually can’t see with the naked eye.
When you acknowledge God in the Creed as creator of “all things visible and invisible,” your mind can range across all the things in the world you can see, and all the things you can’t.
Some of those things we only know at one remove, because they’ve been revealed to us by faith.
Other things we only know at one remove because they’ve been revealed by science.
Sadly, this is where some Catholics today come unstuck. They’ve decided that science is suspect, so they’ve formed their own non-science-based beliefs about the created world instead.
These beliefs are mostly harmless. But they do tend to cause fights and friction in families and parish communities, even good ones.
So when you say, “All things visible and invisible” in the Nicene Creed, you might need to take a moment to pray for the people who you’ve been arguing with about this kind of stuff.
We are a funny sort of hybrid creature because of the fall. We have an immortal soul in a mortal body, but both have been damaged.
Christian life is mostly trying to get the shopping cart of the self to go in a straight line with a wonky wheel.
But our immortal soul still makes us sensitive to “all things invisible” as well.
It’s in every human being who’s ever lived. We gaze at the stars; we wonder why things happen.
We worship a great spirit who we think must be behind the whole business because it’s so crazy big, and so very much out of our control.
So your prayer at this point in the Creed might be for all the people who are still at this stage—who don’t yet know God as a person who really loves them.
One of the great joys of the Incarnation was that God moved from “invisible” to “visible,” just for us.
He is both immanent and transcendent—he’s in creation and outside of it, as only he can be.
He is the author of “all things visible and invisible” in my life, and in yours.
We are all surrounded by “things invisible,” many of which are helping us to push our shopping cart forward through the “things visible” that so often get in the way.
God created all of them, with love and joy. Including you.
So you might also take a moment in the Nicene Creed at this point to say “Thank you.”
