- Feb 5, 2002
- 181,648
- 65,681
- Country
- United States
- Gender
- Female
- Faith
- Catholic
- Marital Status
- Married
- Politics
- US-Others
If we are not self-made, then life is not a struggle for dominance, but an invitation to gratitude, communion, and hope.
The great metaphysical truth on which the whole of Sacred Scripture opens, and to which everything from beginning to end testifies, is that this world in which we live and move and locate our being is a visible and created place. That it is, moreover, the result of a good and generous God who, bringing it forth from nothingness, holds it in being from moment to moment lest it fall back into that same nothingness to which all creation tends when left to its own devices.
Therefore, the world we see and touch, taste and smell and hear, is not the outcome of a God having to somehow struggle against a horde of lesser deities, forced to wrestle with the forces of chaos in order, as it were, to capture the cosmos. But a God who need only say “Be!” and things are, they exist. A God whose very name bespeaks being. “I Am Who Am!” he thunders forth when asked by Moses to reveal his name to the Israelites. “Thus shalt thou say to the children of Israel: He Who Is, hath sent me to you” (Exodus 3:13-14). This is how we are to address the God of Israel, who is at the same time the God of all peoples, and of the universe itself — Yahweh, for Yahweh means “He Who Is.”
Continued below.
The great metaphysical truth on which the whole of Sacred Scripture opens, and to which everything from beginning to end testifies, is that this world in which we live and move and locate our being is a visible and created place. That it is, moreover, the result of a good and generous God who, bringing it forth from nothingness, holds it in being from moment to moment lest it fall back into that same nothingness to which all creation tends when left to its own devices.
Therefore, the world we see and touch, taste and smell and hear, is not the outcome of a God having to somehow struggle against a horde of lesser deities, forced to wrestle with the forces of chaos in order, as it were, to capture the cosmos. But a God who need only say “Be!” and things are, they exist. A God whose very name bespeaks being. “I Am Who Am!” he thunders forth when asked by Moses to reveal his name to the Israelites. “Thus shalt thou say to the children of Israel: He Who Is, hath sent me to you” (Exodus 3:13-14). This is how we are to address the God of Israel, who is at the same time the God of all peoples, and of the universe itself — Yahweh, for Yahweh means “He Who Is.”
Continued below.
How the Doctrine of Creation Grounds All Reality
COMMENTARY: If we are not self-made, then life is not a struggle for dominance, but an invitation to gratitude, communion, and hope.