The Creed at Our Wedding

Sep 25

3 min read

Rich Mullins, a hammered dulcimer, and the promises we spend a lifetime learning to keep

Commemoration of the Venerable Mother Euphrosyne of Alexandria and of the Holy Martyr Paphnutius and 546 Companions in Egypt

Anno Domini 2026, September 25

Rich Mullins’s hammered dulcimer at Old Town Plaza before our wedding service. Picture removed from Doom wedding album.

RICH MULLINS was supposed to be part of our wedding.

Christiane and I were in Manhattan, Kansas, making wedding plans. We had talked about having Rich play “Creed” on the hammered dulcimer during the service. On the drive home from Manhattan, while we were still talking about the wedding and imagining him there, we learned that Rich had been killed in a car accident.

The man could no longer come. But the song did.

At our wedding, my friend Scott Brummer played “Creed” on a hammered dulcimer that had belonged to Rich. Scott’s brother, Steve Brummer, sang the words. Rich’s instrument, held and played by another pair of hands, carried his song into the beginning of our marriage.

It was more than a memorial gesture.

It was an act of tradition: a voice falls silent, and someone else receives what that voice carried. An instrument passes from one person’s hands into another’s. A song is handed on and becomes part of another life—a marriage, a household, a family still being formed nearly three decades later.

“Creed” appeared on A Liturgy, a Legacy, and a Ragamuffin Band. Even the album’s title now seems to name what happened at our wedding. There was liturgy: our lives being gathered into words and actions larger than ourselves. There was legacy: Rich’s faith and music continuing after his death. And there were ragamuffins: ordinary, unfinished people making promises they could not yet understand and would spend the rest of their lives learning how to keep.

The song is Rich Mullins’s musical rendering of the Apostles’ Creed. In the Orthodox Church, Christiane and I now confess the Nicene Creed. The relationship between those two creeds deserves a separate essay, but both remind us that Christianity is not something we manufacture out of our private religious feelings. The faith is given to us. We receive words that were spoken before we were born, and we entrust ourselves to them before we fully comprehend everything they will require of us.

Marriage is something like that. On your wedding day, you speak words whose full meaning you cannot possibly know. You make promises about a future you cannot see to a person who will change—and who will discover how much you still need to change.

You don't invent marriage as you go. You enter it. You receive it as a form of life and then spend years learning how to inhabit what you promised.

A creed says, “This is what I believe.” A wedding vow says, “This is where I will remain.” Neither is merely a report about how I happen to feel today. Both are acts of fidelity. Both give me words to stand inside when my feelings are confused, when circumstances become difficult, or when the person I thought I was proves unequal to the promise I made.

That may be why Rich Mullins has remained, in a strange and distant way, part of our marriage. He was absent from the wedding because of death, yet something he had made—and something he had played—was present. His dulcimer sounded beneath the promises we made. His song placed our promises inside the larger confession of the Church.

Christiane and I had no way of foreseeing the life into which those promises would lead us. We did not know the suffering, joy, failures, forgiveness, children, changes, and returns that would fill the years ahead. We were ragamuffins speaking vows, and we still are.

But the creed remains, and the vows remain. Somewhere beneath the noise of all these intervening years, I can still hear that hammered dulcimer: an instrument passed from one pair of hands to another, sounding a faith we did not invent and calling us again to become faithful to what we once received.

This reflection belongs to the Podvig Listening Room, a place for attending to music not merely as entertainment or recommendation, but as something capable of entering and forming a life. Its practice follows the rhythm of Podvig: behold what a work reveals, practice the attention and truth it asks of us, and become the kind of person capable of receiving what is true and carrying it forward.

Sometimes we discover only decades later what a song has helped us become.