Creation's Quickening (Mid-week)

 

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

Creation’s Quickening

March 29, 2017

One of the vivid memories I have that I cherish is the first time, in each of Elena’s pregnancies, that I held my hand to her belly and felt the child within kick.  Quickening, or the coming to life or movement, is a moment in life that is non-repeatable, and awe-inspiring.  This is not because life before was not real or good, nor because life to come is guaranteed as satisfying and without moments of sorrow.  It is simply because in the moment of quickening we see the wonder of creation, the glory of God’s loving and life-giving presence in the ordinary processes and course of our life.

One of the complaints people have against Christianity is its supposed belittling of human life and experience, urging us to sacrifice now for a greater reward after life, “glory pie in the great by and by.”  But this is a profound misunderstanding of Christianity.  We are created in God’s image, and the natural world and our natural lives reveal the loving creator behind it all, in whose mind it is all being invented.   Our lives are glorious, though not sufficient.  The glories we see in them are foretastes, dim shadows of the real glories to come, when creation has reached its fullness and all that God intends is realized.    

C.S. Lewis, writing to a friend on the subject of the afterlife, says the following.  Note the overall optimism and joy found in our life here and now: 

“The symbols under which Heaven is presented to us are (a) a dinner party, (b) a wedding, (c) a city, and (d) a concert. It would be grotesque to suppose that the guests or citizens or members of the choir didn’t know one another. And how can love of one another be commanded in this life if it is to be cut short at death?

“Think of yourself just as a seed patiently waiting in the earth: waiting to come up a flower in the Gardener’s good time, up into the real world, the real waking. I suppose that our whole present life, looked back on from there, will seem only a drowsy half- waking. We are here in the land of dreams. But cock-crow is coming.”  (from Words to Live By: A Guide for the Merely Christian. Copyright © 2007 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.)

Grace and Peace,

Fr. Tony+