10-Minute Catechism
Lesson 2 – Creation
Memory Verse:”For you
love all things that are and loathe nothing that you have made; for you would
not fashion what you hate. How could a thing remain, unless you willed it; or
be preserved, had it not been called forth by you?” (Wisdom 11:24-25 NABRE)
So, in
the last lesson, we talked about how God slowly revealed everything about
himself to humanity in stages, and how the first stage of that relationship was
Creation. We find the story of Creation in the first book of the Bible, and in
fact, in the first verse of the first chapter of the first book: “In the
beginning, God created the heaven and the Earth.” This is echoed in the first
verse of the Gospel according St. John. “In the beginning was the WORD, and the
Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Believing that everything around us
comes, ultimately, from God is the most fundamental belief in the Christian
faith, but it needs a bit of explanation.
If you
read the first chapter of Genesis, one thing that should hit you immediately is
that Genesis reads quite a bit differently from a science textbook, which is
alright, because it is NOT a science textbook. Instead, it builds the narrative
of Creation much like you would describe a sunset: first, you would talk about
the colors, then the background, the land, the creatures crawling on the
ground, and finally, what it felt like as you stood on the front porch basking
in the warm summer light. The chapter on the seven days of Creation are much
the same way: it is a description of Creation told in the form of a story. The
biblical story of creation decidedly NOT a detailed explanation about how the
world, or even humanity itself, came into being. For the details, we have to
look to scientific inquiry. The ongoing controversy between certain Christians
and the scientific community over evolution really has no merit.
Something
else we notice about the Creation story is how it emphasizes the goodness of Creation. At the end of each
day, the Scriptures tell us that God looked at what He had made “and God saw
that it was good” (Genesis 1:24). At no point does God do any take-backs. He
doesn’t look at humanity, even after all the sin and pain that humanity causes
on the earth and say, “You know what, never mind, y’all are awful.” This comes to a fundamental
belief in the Catholic Christian faith: everything that exists, in so far as it
was created by God, is good. It
continues to be good, willed by God, and beautiful in His eyes. (See the memory
verse for today.) Sure, sometimes we misuse
those creations, but they remain good in and of themselves, and even human
beings, for all of our faults, are always loved and always worthy of
redemption.
Finally,
and I think this is perhaps the most interesting aspect of Catholic teaching
regarding Creation, is that everything was created from absolutely NOTHING. In
the very first verse we find that everything has its source in God, and from
the first verse of John’s Gospel, we find that, in fact, the only source for
our being is “word”. In other words, we are the result of God’s speaking. We have
nothing at the center of our being except that God thinks of us and speaks us
into creation.
If you
think about it, what this means is that, ultimately, we are just like dreams.
Dreams rely, for their existence, only on the mind of the person who is dreaming.
They have no reality outside of that person. In fact, it could be said that,
relative to the person who is having a dream, dreams themselves don’t exist. We
are God’s dream. Relative to him, and without him, we do not exist at all. We
have no meaning, identity, or purpose on our own. We entirely belong to his reality.
We are his thought.
As we
try to reflect on what this means for our lives, I think that it should, first
of all, open us up to understanding the level of responsibility that we have as
Christians to care for God’s creation, something that he considered ‘good’ and
committed to our care. At the same time, I think it’s worth contemplating the
ways that our good, and ultimately the good of everything else in the world,
ultimately depends on its relationship with God. After all, we come from him
and are in the process of returning to him: how could we hope to fulfil our
function without him?
Additional Reading:
Catechism of the Catholic Church 282-289
Genesis 1:1 – 2:1
John 1
Catechism of the Catholic Church 282-289
Genesis 1:1 – 2:1
John 1
No comments:
Post a Comment