Mystic Christ, Painting by Fr. John Giuliani
Goodness
at the Heart of Things
Fr.
Tony’s Midweek Message
June
6, 2018
“And God saw all
that He had made, and,
behold, how very
good it was!” Gen. 1:31
There
is a deep optimism at the heart of our faith.
Affirming the creation—the teaching that all things, including us, came
into being at the word of a loving and all-nurturing Deity—means affirming love
and purpose at the heart of things. Granted,
at times in history this essential optimism has been dimmed somewhat by talk of
flaws and faults in our very natures (what Augustine of Hippo—that no-so-completely-reconstructed Manichean—called “original sin.”) But
the basic idea that God is good and loving and that God made the universe means
that all things are in fact are an artifact of goodness, a reflection of love.
We
see God reflected in the natural world.
Paul writes in Romans, “For what can be known of God is plain… Ever
since the creation of the world, his eternal power and divine nature, invisible
though they are, have been understood and known through the things He made”
(Rom. 1:19-20). Some people wonder
whether this can be true, seeing “nature red in tooth and claw” and the great
wastefulness of natural selection, evolution, and mass extinctions. Others
take these aspects of nature and wonder whether God is a monster, or a
capricious tormentor of his creatures.
But
the Psalmist has no such worries: “Yours is the day, O Lord, yours also is the
night. You established the moon and the
sun. You fixed all the boundaries of the
earth; you made both summer and winter” (Psa. 74:15-16); “[God] covers the heavens with clouds, prepares rain for the earth,
makes grass grow on the hills. He gives
to the animals their food, and to the young ravens when they cry” (Psa.
147:8-9). So even if there is on
occasion hardship in nature, blessing remains:
“The young lions suffer want and hunger, but those who seek
the Lord lack no good thing” (Psa.
34:10).
This
is what Jesus was thinking about when he taught, “Are not two
sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart
from your Father. And even the hairs of your head
are all counted. So do not be
afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows” (Matt. 10:29-31); “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what
you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is
not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of
the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly
Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by
worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider
the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell
you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if
God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is
thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you?” (Matt 6:25-30)
In all this, the love and providence
of God are seen to be reflected in the abundance and beauty of God’s creation, nature.
Spirituality is in many ways the
manner in which we experience, process, and share in the transcendent, the
ineffable, the sacred in the world about us and in our life. One of
the great blessings of the Celtic spirituality celebrated and taught by many of
our parishioners and members of the Ashland community is its recognition of God
at work in the work about us, especially the natural world. Even when vague in expression and unadorned by
traditional doctrine or authority, this sense of original blessing gives life
and joy. The thankfulness at its heart is
the great antidote to fear, despair, and even guilt or shame, especially pathological
worrying about vaguely perceived failings and shortcomings.
Grace and Peace.
Fr. Tony+
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