On Living Within, a review of The Lover’s Creed

I’ll be straight with you; Lovers’ Creed could sound like your dead grandma mid-5am Counseling. “The hustle and bustle of daily life can often drown you instead of responsibilities, expectations, and emotional turmoil. When you do not recognize your ability to lean on God, feelings of isolation, anxiety, and even hopelessness can begin to take over.” Loopy language aside, Chinwe Chidi goes to art festivals telling GenZ poets and photographers, sharing four specific anxieties like bookmarks, that the love of Jesus is the cure. The same love of Jesus that __ (insert your trauma story).

Well, she is way younger than your grandma. The skin beneath their eyes is creased with as much of that knowing.  You would sense it, just below the veneer of Christian open-handedness, a shell rebuilt hardened by palms softer than the comfort she’d lived in Nigeria. Loss, usually, leads to you to take stock of what you have. Chinwe Chidi understands this, loss, enough to make a book.

Mind, The Lovers’ Creed is hardly about the friends she lost- one to suicide. As followers of The Way find, not what you think once in a while when you are in church, or have just read a good book, but your predominant mental attitude is what counts. Haanel, freemason and Republican businessman, wrote this and a deal about mental attitudes- including the most potent, love- and their primacy in shaping events in our lives, in the ageless Master Key System.

Regarded by the New Thought movement with the reverence accorded Mulford and Eckert Toole, Haanel paraphrased truths held thousand years prior by Vedic and Abrahamic scriptures. On living within. This is the tradition Chidi soars from, insisting from page to page that looking out for succour when we have been wounded compounds the trouble. ‘The more I pursued those things, the more exhausted I became,’ she writes, going on to detail how she reclaimed her transcendental compass. Finding romance in the nearness of God, the Christian one in this case. I have expressed so far that spiritual disciplines can lead to the same place for everyone if you ignore the nouns- no difference in the life force if addressed as Jesus or Chukwu or Universe.  

Structured in seven creeds, the writing oscillates between memoir and gospel tract (I wish it were better executed, but who says spiritual gurus have to be stylistic).  Chinwe, survivor from the mental abyss the death of a friend plunged her into, frames the mental health crisis as a spiritual battle rooted in the human condition. Man’s nature is to be blind to latent light, often driven by selfishness and greed as he is. This inward focus blinds individuals from experiencing God’s greater love. The book draws heavily on biblical figures and scripture to support this argument. For example, she uses the experiences of David and Job, who both cried out to God in their despair, to show that feelings of abandonment are not unique to the modern age. However, the key takeaway is that both figures ultimately believed God was present and attentive, illustrating that a genuine relationship with God persists even in silence and pain.

Weaving Christian doctrine throughout its lessons, the Holy Spirit is presented as a divine presence sent by God to guide and redirect believers, empowering them to resist despair and selfish desires, to live beyond the human nature. The author shares her own experience of prioritizing a human relationship over her relationship with God, an act she identifies as a selfish desire that blinded her. The solution she found was yielding to the Holy Spirit’s promptings, which helped her to see beyond her own nature and into the truth of God’s love. This shows that the Christian life is not merely about adhering to a set of rules but about allowing the Holy Spirit to transform one’s heart and mind.

Interestingly, a core implicit theme of the work is the critical distinction between what we might call Godliness for the abstract, intellectual concept of God and a living, tangible relationship with Him. The author’s personal story of heartbreak highlights this divide. She had a theological understanding that God hears prayers but when she cried out to Him in her deepest pain, her questions were filled with doubt: “Can You see me? Can you even see that I am hurt?” This is the crisis of Godliness.

Her healing began not with a logical answer, but with an intimate, emotional experience: “I felt His arms wrapped around me” and “His words penetrated the silence like a beam of light.”  This is the genesis of moving from “Godliness” to loving God.

The shift is from knowing about Him to knowing Him directly. The book argues that many people today are suffering from mental health issues because they are trying to sustain themselves on in nebulous belief amidst the raw, brutal realities of life. C.S. Lewis in a poetry collection published after his death insists reaching out to God is easier achieved compared to chasing mental satisfaction in the wind or through material means. Start with believing your wounds are his, that he is just as invested to see them soothed, as in the poet’s final lines in Love’s as Warm as Tears:

Who, having made us, knew/The thing He had done, Seeing (with all that is)/ Our cross, and His.

The Devil’s goal, according to the text, is to separate people from God through distractions and lies, leading them to seek comfort in a world that “is greedy” and “does not love.”

This spiritual expose provides a profound alternative to secular views on mental health. It may sound like your Grandma, but she lived a happy life with the creeds Chidi encourages. Swear an oath to the creed and pray that it works.   

Ebri Kowaki is an arts and culture journalist. His works have appeared in The Republic, UbuntuAfrica, Afrocritik, African Writer Magazine, and elsewhere.

ALSO READ TOP STORIES FROM NIGERIAN TRIBUNE