37. THE CREATION, A GOD´S GIFT

37. THE CREATION, A GOD´S GIFT

1. - The creation is the beginning of the salvation history. But we need to discover before the experience of faith, in order to live the world and the life like a gift of God. That is what happens in the Bible. Israel first discovers God like Lord of history and later on he recognizes him like Lord of the creation. Having discovered the living God who passes by saving and liberating, Israel comes to live the creation like a God’s gift.

2. - It’s obvious, many do not live in this way. Those who affirm: Everything is God, the world is God (pantheism); there are two principles, the Goodness and the Evil, in permanent fight (dualism); the material world is bad and, so, it must be rejected and overcome (gnosis); only the matter exists and it exists infinitely (materialism); God does not exist (atheism) or he cannot be known (agnosticism); the world is left by God’s hand, God does not intervenes in the history (deism).

3. - From the faith’s experience, first Genesis chapter invites us to live the world and the life like a God’s gift, like a man’s task, like a Father’s praising motive, from whom everything comes. Priests exiled in Babylon write the statement about the fifth century, willing to maintain the believer identity in a strange country. Under literary forms and real images from that epoch, the narration contains a permanent value message about God, the man and the world.

4. - In the beginning, when God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth had no form and was void; darkness was over the deep and the Spirit of God hovered over the waters. (Gn 1, 1-2). The chaos, the emptiness, the abyss and the waters are images that take us to the primordial moment, when there was nothing. The creation idea from nothing will be formulated later on (2 Mac 7, 28). The message is the same: God has created the whole universe. The expression heaven and earth designates the entire reality. It is the old vision of the world, then common: The earth below, the heaven above, the celestial vault separating the below and above waters. Under the image of the bird flying over the nest where its chickens are, God is presented hovering over the world.

5. - The Genesis narration presents the entireness of the beings successively created, until it reaches the man. The ordination is summary and global, it does not pretend to present a scientific universe origin, but a faith vision. The ordination is in crescendo: the inferior beings appear first and are subordinated to the superior ones. At the end, in the peak of the creation, appears the man, God’s image: So God created man in his image; in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them: Be fruitful and increase in number, fill the earth and subdue it (1,27-28). The man, male and female, participates in the creator God’s power, he dominates the earth, he has in his hands a task from which the universe destiny depends. The world is not only good, but even very good (1,25.31).

6. - The sacerdotal narration presents the creation in the frame of a week that ends in the Sabbath’s rest (Gen 2,1-4). The frame is religious. Everything is ordered to the man and the man in ordered to God. That is what the Sabbath celebrates: If you stop profaning the Sabbath and doing as you please on the holy day, if you call the sabbath a day of delight…. Then you will find happiness in Yahweh, over the heights you will ride triumphantly, on the inheritance of your father Jacob you will feast joyfully. (Is 58,13-14). The world and the life are not only God’s gift and man’s task, but also an immense occasion to bless the Father. We can live the saturday like a delight, rest, travel to the heights, food, future anticipation. The letter to the Hebrews says: It is clear that we have a Sabbath’s rest for God’s people. And also: He who enters this rest of God rests from all his works as God rests from his work. (Heb 4,9-10).

7. - The world is not a hazard product, nor it is blindly oriented: He who formed the eye, will he not see? (Ps 94,9). The universe is an open book, it speaks about God: The heavens declare the glory of God (Ps 19,2). The world reflects God’s wisdom: You disposed everything with measure, number and weight (Wis 11,10). Even more, the universe is inspired. God talks through the creation. God said it and existed (Gen 1). And also: In the beginning was the Word, says Saint John., all things were made through him and without him nothing come to be (Jn 1,1-3).

8. - Many people do not see it like that, of course. This calamity is written down in the book of the Wisdom: The natural helplessness of men is seen in their ignorance of God…. The experience of good things did not lead them to the knowledge of His who is. (Wis 13,1). Same thing is denounced in Saint John’s Evangel. He was already in the world and through him the world was made, the very world that did not know him. Even more, he came to his own, yet his own people did not receive him. (Jn 1,10-11).

9. - Nevertheless, in the faith’s experience we can discover that we did not come to the world by a hazard, neither are we abandoned to our own luck, that we have been called by God to the existence: He calls the non-existent as if already existing (Rom 4,17). Every person is a unique reality, who can be recognized like a God’s creature; You created my entrails, you have knitted me together in my mother’s womb (Ps 139). Regardless of his dependency of the nature and of its multiple limitations, the man reflects a fullness that does not transcends. We sing in the psalm 8: You have crowned him with glory and honour, you have given him dominion over the works of your hands, you have put all things under his feet, Lord, our God, how great is your name all over the earth.

10. - The Symbol of the Apostles confesses that God is “ the Creator of heaven and earth”, and the one of Nicaea-Constantinople adds: “of all things visible and invisible”. The readings in the Paschal Night, that celebrate the history of the salvation, begin with the creation narrative. In the first century’s catechesis, the preparation of the catechumens follows the same line.

11. - The four nights poem, that in the old commentaries enlightens the paschal celebration, evokes those events of the salvation history, in which we acknowledge that our destiny is in the hands of God: the creation, the covenant, the exodus, the future. Then, when we acquire conscience of it, we were like those moving in a dream (Ps 126), we discover that God is love (Ps 103), that he is in the origin of the being itself (Ps 139), that he manifests himself in the in the events of life (Gen 15,5-18), that he is with us (Ex 3,15), also in the difficult days or when is night, that opens a way where there is nothing: in the dessert, at sea, in the death. In his name we lift the cup of the salvation (Ps 116).

12. - The history of salvation culminates with the experience of Christ. But now: how is the creation perceived from this summit? It is what Paul contemplates in the noisy loneliness of the prison (Eph 4,1), like it appears in the Letter to the Ephesians (perhaps sent to the Laodiceans: Col 4,17).

13. - The letter sings God’s plan: Blessed be God, the Father of Christ Jesus our Lord, who chose us in him before the creation of the world (Eph 1, 3-4). He elected us. We are not a hazard’s fruit. We are a God’s project, who in his intention we occupy a place former and superior to the world’s creation. He elected us in love to be his adopted sons through Christ Jesus, thus fulfilling his free and generous will (Eph 1,5)

14. - Like in the Old Testament, God’s people is liberated from masters and lords that oppress and slave it; now we live a new exodus through Christ, sealed by his blood, in this appears the greatness of his grace, which is lavished on us, in all wisdom and understanding, God has made known to us his mysterious design (Eph 1,7-8).

15. - The mystery refers to the world and history’s sense, how God conceived it, summing up everything in Christ: In him and under him God wanted to unite, when the fullness of time had come, everything in heaven and on earth (Eph 1,10). Paul proclaims, astonished, the secret, the gravitation deepest of the world and the history. Christ in not only the Lord of history, but also of the universe. The Letter to the Colossians says: He is the image of the unseen God, and for all creation he is the firstborn, for in him all things were created (Col 1,15).

16. - Like in other times, God’s people received an earth in heritage, now we receive other heritage through Christ: You, on hearing the word of truth, the Gospel that saves you, have believed in him. And, as promised, you were sealed with the Holy Spirit, the first pledge of what we shall receive, on the way to our deliverance as a people of God, for the praise of his glory (Eph 1,13-14).

17. - It is a God’s present. We need that God light the eyes of our heart in order to know which is the hope to which we have been called, which the wealth of the glory granted to the saints, which the sovereign greatness of his power for us, the believers, according to the effectiveness of his powerful strength, displayed in Christ: Thus has God put all things under the feet of Christ and set him above all things, as head of the church which is his body, he who fills all in all unfolds his fullness in his Church. (Eph 1, 22-23). The Church is the body of Christ, Lord of the world and of the history. Christ has become one flesh with her (Eph 5, 31-32).

18. - The French Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin appeared in a moment in which the old vision of the world assumed by the scholastic philosophy, the one known like “perennial philosophy”, was giving clear signs of weakness. Confronting incomprehension, marginality and exile, Teihard offered a new vision of the world, evolutionary and dynamic. It was cause of freedom to certify that the evolution does not oppose to the faith or, by itself, to any philosophy. It is a fact that the science discovers. The minimum creed common to all evolutionism is this: it exists a physical tie between all living beings and, by extension, between all real things.

19. - Clever and believer, Teilhard considers illegitimate the schism that gradually, from the Renaissance, separates the christianism from the modern world. In his person and in his work, he establishes an evangelising dialogue with the world. He returns to the christianism its cosmologic sense and he offers to an evolutionary world the light of the Revelation.

20. - The universe in evolutionarily centred. The cosmic development direction follows a principle of growing recapitulation: cosmogenesis- biogenesis-anthropogenesis, it is to say, the world-the life-the man. But a problem arises: the man, reflexive element of the world, perceives by own and scientific experience his own finiteness and that of the world itself. But now, before the brutal fact of the death and the universal law of the entropy, where is the world and man’s sense? If the nothingness is the future of the evolution, has really any sense the precedent effort?.

21. - In his book The human phenomena, Teilhard makes a hypothesis: if Omega exists, then everything is explainable. The death too. The death is, so, the step forward that flows in the Omega’s plenitude. The point Omega would be a transcendental and personal reality that gives sense to the world and man immense adventure. In the light of the reason, we cannot step up any more. But changing the perspective and considering the matters in the Revelation’s light, Omega is Christ, who fills, perfects, makes consistent and recaptures all the creation. It is a Pauline vision. In The hymn to the Universe Teilhard says: “You have occupied, by the Resurrection right, the milestone point of the total Centre in which everything is concentrated”. And also: “Christ is loved like a person an he is imposed like a world”.

22. - Teilhard died in New York, the 10^th of April 1955, Resurrection Pasch. Three days before his death, he wrote the last page of his diary, a surprising resume of his entire thinking: “The Universe in evolutionally centred. Christ in the Centre”. And “the three vesicles” (1 Co 15, 26-28), those that say: the last enemy to be destroyed will be death, since Christ placed all enemies under his feet. Little before, the 15^th of March, during a dinner in the French consulate, Teilhard had expressed an intimae desire: “I would like to die in the Resurrection day”. And so it happened. Happenings.

23. - Let’s see how the sense of the world and the life changes when we discover the faith’s experience. André Frossard, the son of the once general secretary of the French socialist party, had been educated in the atheism. His parents had decided that he will choose by himself his own religion when 20 years old, if he wanted to follow one. At home, anything coming from the Catholicism was rejected, with one exception, the person of Christ: “We were not in his side, but he could be one of us because of his love to the poor, his severity with respect to the powerful, and, above all, because of the fact that he had been the victim of the priests, id est, of those placed in the highest, the executed by the power and its repressive organization. My father was usually ready to declaim to his friends a poem titled If he came back, written in a popular language over the theme of an eventual Christ’s return between the men…. My father declaimed this passage with an extraordinary strength: You still have the lance in your side?

24. - Frossard says in his book God exists. I met him (1970), how, when he was 20, he met God. It is necessary to mention the mediation of a friend, some years older than he, André Villemin. Born a catholic, he had lost his faith when he was 15 years old, to find it again later on. Both work in the same newspaper. They discussed about everything, also about politics. In certain occasion, the friend asked openly to him about the sense of his life. Frossard did not expect such a question and recurred to his hobby. To row, he answered. The laughter he contemplated was enormous. Well, Frossard relates his faith’s experience as follows: “It was a moment of stupor that still endures. I never have got used to God’s existence. Having, at ten past five in the evening, gone into a chapel of the Latin Quarters looking for a friend, I got out at a quarter past five accompanied by a friendship that did not belong to the earth”

25. - The chapel belong to the Sisters of the Repairing Adoration: “Standing near the door I look for my friend and did not get to acknowledge him between all the knelt figures before me. My glance goes from the shadow to the light, it comes back to the people without bringing any thought, it goes from the faithful to the immobile religious, from the religious to the altar; then, I don’t know why, my glance fixes in the second candle that is lit to the left of the cross. Not in the first one, neither in the third, in the second one. Then, all of a sudden, unchains the series of prodigies whose inexorable violence will dismantle in an instant the absurd being I am, and will deliver to the world, glared, the child I never have been”.

26. - “Before anything, these words are suggested to me: spiritual life. They are not said to me, I don’t shape them by myself, I listen them like if a person who would see what I don’t see, yet pronounced them near me, in low voice. The last syllable of this murmured prelude, scarcely reaches in me the border of the conscience that starts a backwards avalanche. I don’t say that the heaven opens; it does not open, it raises, it lifts all of a sudden… He is the reality, he is the truth, I see it from the obscure bank side where I am retained. There is an order in the universe, and in its vertex, farther away from this foggy resplendent veil, God’s evidence; the evidence made presence and the evidence made person in That whom I would have denied a moment before… His irruption displayed, plenary, is accompanied by a merriness that is not more than the exultation of the saved, the merriness of the wrecked picked up in good time”.

27. - “In the outside, the weather continued being wonderful… Willemin, who walked at my side and it looked like having discovered something singular in my physiognomy, observed me with a medical insistence: But, what does it happen to you?. I am a catholic, and like if I were afraid of not being explicit enough, I added: apostolic and roman, so that my confession were complete… Five minutes later, in the terrace of a coffee shop of a Saint-André-des-Arts square, I related everything to my fellow”.

28. - “Filled up with blessings, I thought that my life would be a Christmas that never would end”. Nevertheless, “over my home fell twice the biggest suffering that can be inflicted to human beings. The fathers will understand me, the mothers even better, without any more words. I have taken twice the provincial cemetery way where my place is marked, looking with horror for the mercifulness remembrance. Unable to rebel, excluded of the refugees of the doubt, about what would I doubt but from myself?, I have lived with that lance in my breast and knowing that God is love… The tomb that will be mine shapes a two streets corner. One day I had the distracted curiosity of seeing whose was the neighbouring tomb, which exactly juxtaposes it: it was that of the Sisters of the Repairing Adoration… The coincidence was enough for me. Five hundred kilometres away, the little sisters that have assisted my birth will also be there at the time of my death, and I think, I believe, I know, that those two instants will be identical, like only one, at last, the lost beings, the reencountered sweetness. Love, to call you so, the eternity will be short”

*From the faith’s experience and in dialogue with diverse positions:

- we live the creation like a God’s gift

- we acknowledge Christ like Lord of the history and of the universe

- we assume the dynamic vision of the world

- we comment Frossard´s experience.