Every week I go to a Catholic mass.  And every week I recite the Nicene Creed:

We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.

We believe in Jesus Christ,
his only Son, our Lord
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, light from light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father;
through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven,
and became human.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered, died, and was buried.
On the third day he rose again
in fulfillment of the Scriptures;
he ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son,
who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified,
who has spoken through the prophets.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come. Amen.

There’s that one line that intrigues me:  “For us men and our salvation, he came down from heaven.  By the the power of the Holy Spirit, He was born of the Virgin Mary and became man.”

“For us men…”

But we’re not all men.

“…he…became man…”

Now, I’m not a nitpicker, particularly of the Catholic church’s semantics, because the pronouns for God and Jesus and nearly all  biblically important people begin with the letter H and end with E.  It’s a losing battle, I’ve found, to try and wrestle with the overemphasis of God/Jesus’ masculinity.

There seemed to be this tiny disconnect as I said those words over and over again: For us men..

I always wanted to ask, “Would it be that hard just to say for us all?”

Would it make that big of a difference if we stopped referring to “us” as “men?”

I’m not a linguist.  I’m not a rhetorician.  I majored in English, yes, but I’m a far cry from a language expert.  However, I do know that English, unlike other romance languages that have a gender neutral pronoun that do not infer one gender or another, uses the universal “he” to throw everyone under the umbrella while still retaining the power to be used exclusively to refer to males.  Meaning, we don’t have a gender neutral pronoun, so we use “he” as the unifier even though it has connotations for maleness.

Since I was a little girl, I thought it sounded odd and it wasn’t until my 20s when I started to take pause with “for us men and our salvation…” part.  I refused to say it.  The earth didn’t stop spinning.  My heart continued beating and, unbelievably, I did not suffer from any demonic possessions that night.  I just repeated something else in my head.  Something I felt more connected to:  For us all and our salvation.

‘Cause I’m pretty sure Christ came for us all and its our weeny little battles with language, propriety, and patriarchy that compel us to make it a bigger deal than it needs to be.

But, it still haunts me, when I say the Nicene Creed aloud and I watch little girls say: For us men and our salvation…

Is it merely a language class she’ll need to take later to clear up this little disconnect?  Or is it possibly more than that?  What will she think when it’s coupled with the story of when five thousand men who were fed in the bible and women and children weren’t counted?  Where might she get the idea that she doesn’t count?  From our learned prayers?  From close readings of Scripture?  From looking up at the pulpit and rarely seeing someone representing her race?  Her language?  Never seeing her gender?

One of my favorite quotes is from Martin Heidegger, a German philosopher, who wrote in Letter on Humanism, 1947 a very simple, yet profound statement: Language is the house of being.

When I am holding my son and I profess my faith during mass, is it more important for him to understand these technical pieces of our English language?  Or is it more important for him to know why I sound different during a particular part of mass?  While most congregations utter the traditional “men,” I say “all.”  Not to raise a stink, not to be different, not to make a point.  I say all because I feel a connection to a greater Thing when I use language that means something to me.  It’s as simple as that.  My language is my house of being.  What I say is the roof over my existence.  I am not a man.  Why should I say I am?

And when we profess that Jesus became “man?”  Albeit, true, but I find it more powerful to centralize his humanness than his gender.  Jesus became human.

Jesus became man. vs.  Jesus became human.

My vote for most powerful goes to the latter.

Again, this is not an argument of semantics.  If I wanted to quibble over the nitty gritty, I’d love 50 years of my life in a scholarly debate (that I’d surely lose anyway) over matters that I don’t believe make a difference.

But that line: …For us men and our salvation…

I do take issue.  That’s where I believe that a small adjustment – like using the word ALL –  can remove a pause that many women take when they declare themselves as men and tell themselves in their head, “yes, I am included in this even if I am not a man.”  How many pauses do you think women make in their heads in that translation?  Pauses that men never have to make?  Or, perhaps some women make no pause whatsoever and just include themselves in a word that technically does not include them, but is used as the universal rope to tie us all together for the sake of our salvation?

Faith is hard enough.  Living out principles of goodness, hope, and love are difficult deeds.  And if a funny glance from the person sitting in front of me during the Nicene Creed is the small price to pay for an altered prayer that results in a greater connection to G*d…well, maybe I’ll just start closing my eyes to shut out the curious glances.