Our Life in the Lord Part Two: The Making of All Things
God speaks, and things come to pass. He breathes and speaks over the “waters,” and order replaces chaos. He speaks all of creation into being out of nothing. He doesn’t shape material he found lying about, for there was nothing to shape and nowhere to put it. Existence itself was given where there had been none, and continuously held “in being” at every moment afterward by the same generosity that originally supplied the same existence.. Take away God’s intentional care (holding in existence) and a creature does not fall apart. It simply ceases to be.
Scripture’s own first word for this is “breath.” The Hebrew word ruach means breath, wind, and spirit all at once. Genesis opens with the ruach of God sweeping over the waters, turning chaos into order the way breath animates the silence with motion and sound. The psalmist maintains the same picture: when God hides his face, creatures wither and return to their dust. When he sends forth his spirit, they are created and the face of the earth is renewed. That is, existence is not a possession creatures hold personally, but a gift continually arriving; matter without God animating it serves little purpose. Without God holding it together in existence, nothing would even manage to be simple dust.
A World Made Knowable
Everything comes to be through the Word. He is the one through whom all things were made. The tradition has called the Son the "Divine Geometer," for through him things have intelligibility and discoverability. That is, things hold together in patterns our minds can discern (intelligibility), and they yield those patterns to anyone who looks sufficiently long and deep enough (discoverability). Because God made the world through his Word, the world has an order that we can discover. The universe can be explored and inform us about the nature of reality. It does not merely resist investigation the way a stone resists a shovel; it rewards investigation the way a book rewards a reader. And so, curiosity about the world is an approach to God, not a distraction from him.
God’s creation was not a single instant. God unfolds the universe across eons: light, then matter, then worlds, vast reaches of time and space arranged toward a purpose that would arrive much later. A theological reading describes that long unfolding as a kind of "self-emptying," borrowing the word scripture reserves for the Incarnation. The scale of the cosmos is no argument against our significance. Its scale measures God’s generosity.
A consequence follows, and a later liar (The Satan) will depend on our forgetfulness. A world made through the Word is a world made knowable on purpose. God doesn't hide the workings of things, and he doesn't fear our knowledge of them, because he isn't competing with us for anything. He made us, replete with minds. He then made a universe that rewards minds with discovery. Every discovery lets us read a little more of the almighty’s handwriting. When the accusation by the devil finally comes in the garden (the claim that God hoards and withholds), the world itself will already have answered it, laid open as it is to be known.
The World as School
God created the world and all its wonders so that we could learn in it what he intends to give us forever. He made it a place to practice charity and mercy, and to learn trust the way children learn it: at small scales, with time to fail and begin again. That is, the world is our school and our home at once. We live here in earnest, in a home God meant us to have, and here we learn how to dwell: with him, and with each other. Our lasting home is heaven, and God aims every lesson of this home at that one. Nothing here was ever meant to be final, which is why nothing here ever quite satisfies us. The ache we feel at that insufficiency is not a flaw in God's creation but one of his instruments: a homing signal he built into every human heart.
Dust, Breath, and Soul
Late in his long work of creation, God does something different in kind. He crafts a creature out of the clay of the ground. He breathes his own breath into that clay. Man is dust. He shares the substance of the soil God took him from: Hebrew forms the name "Adam" from adamah (the ground); Latin forms its word for humility from humus (the earth). Man is also breath. God breathed into him something that did not come up out of the soil. "For God formed us to be imperishable; the image of his own nature he made us" (Wis 2:23). The image is not in our appearance or our power but in our capacity to know and to love. That is, we are made able to love as God loves: freely, and outward. God is a communion of persons. A creature made in his image and likeness was made for communion. None of us can be complete alone.
[Supplied] The soul is not a fine kind of matter. Nor does the word "soul" merely name what the body does. The soul is the spiritual principle of the human person, the part of us that no instrument can weigh. God creates each soul directly, for each person who has ever existed. The soul does not die when the body dies. Nor is a man a spirit temporarily wearing flesh. A man is one creature, a composite being, body and soul together. God intends friendship with the whole man, not with a fragment of the man. Everything God promises at the far end of his plan, including the raising of our bodies, rests on this.
No soul is a copy. God creates each one deliberately, for a particular person who will never be repeated, with a purpose set into that person before birth. Nobody was mass-produced. Nobody arrived by accident, whatever the circumstances looked like to the people involved. This is the root of the dignity the Church defends so stubbornly at every stage of human life, from the womb to the deathbed: not that every human being is useful, or wanted, or well, but that every human being is willed, by name, by God, and made able to know him and to love him. A person is the only creature on earth God made for that person's own sake.
The Garden as Sanctuary
Genesis tells where God set this creature: a garden. The later scriptures describe the tabernacle and the temple in language borrowed from that garden. Read alongside those descriptions, Eden looks like a sanctuary; the Fathers of the Church, with many scholars since, have read Eden exactly that way. In their reading, the garden is the created world's holy of holies, with Adam placed in it as a kind of priest. Genesis does not state this in so many words. The sanctuary is what the Fathers see in the verses, not what the verses say outright. Yet their reading gathers up what the verses do say: God fashions the earth as a dwelling place; God sets mankind in the garden; there God walks with the creature he made to receive him, in the cool of the day.
Work Before the Fall
For the garden came with work. The work tells us what man is for. Adam is set to till and to keep, which is cultivation, drawing out what was planted to be drawn out. He names the animals, which is a real participation in the creative act and not a chore to keep him busy. He is given dominion, which in God’s grammar has never meant ownership; it is the delegated care of another’s goods according to the owner’s instructions. That is, man was deputed a steward and a gardener from the beginning, charged to lead all creation back to its maker as an offering. The charge has never been revoked.
The arrangement is strange. It also dignifies the man. God, who needs no help, makes work for his creature where there was none. When Adam names the animals, the naming sticks; God brings them to the man to see what he will call them, which means the world was left unfinished on purpose, with room in it for a creature’s real contribution. Every labor since, every field tended and child raised and wall built and meal made, belongs to that line. Work was never the punishment; the sweat and the thorns were the punishment, and they came later. The work itself is older than the Fall, and it will outlast it.
A Helpmate and the Family
God did not mean the garden's work to be solitary. "It is not good for the man to be alone" (Gn 2:18). God does not say this merely as a remedy for loneliness. A creature made in the image of a communion cannot reflect that communion by himself. Gardening of this kind is not a solitary task. God takes the woman from the man's side, from the middle of him: not from his head, to rule him; not from his feet, to be trodden on. She is the helpmate, the helper suited to him: taken from his substance, given for the shared work. The man greets her as bone of his bones, flesh of his flesh. Together they were to be fertile, to fill the earth, to subdue it in the manner of caretakers, and to hand on life. The family stands at the origin of every later society. From the beginning the family bears the stamp of its maker: distinct persons, bound by mutual love, a small and imperfect mirror of the communion whose image they carry.
The family is the first church and the first school. A family bears the resemblance of its maker even when it bears that resemblance badly. Every family in heaven and on earth is named from the Father, so that all families carry the name and brand of God whether they know it or not. The mirror is a dark one. Our families know which of our buttons to push because they installed them. Nobody looks at an ordinary household and sees the Trinity plainly. Still, an enduring family, its distinct persons bound in one love, gives most people the nearest view of God's inner life they will ever have from the inside.
Rest Created and Set Apart
On the seventh day God rested. He did not rest because he was weary; God has no body to tire. He stands outside the time he made. He rested to create a condition of rest: a day set apart, built into the week before there was any weariness to recover from. The seventh day is not God's recovery but God's ordinance. He set the importance of rest for the creatures he had just wrought. The day protects time away from toil, directed toward relationship, because the whole arrangement is about relationship. A creature that never stops working never remembers whom the work was for. Scripture calls this day "holy," its first use of the word. Holy means set apart: God set the seventh day apart from the six days of work. The same word will later mark his people, his places, and God himself, the most set apart of all.
God does not stop setting time apart at one day. In the Law to come, he will build rest into whole years: every seventh year a sabbatical for the land, and after seven sevens a Jubilee, when debts were released, slaves went free, and lost land returned to its family. (unfortunately, the fullest sense of this has never been implemented). Rest, in God's arrangement, is a rhythm built through a whole life. A rest that means doing nothing at all is a daydream that deceives us; call it the illusion of unencumbered comfort. Eden offered no such rest; heaven offers none either. What both offer is better: activity subordinated to nothing else besides abiding with God.
Original Holiness and Its Horizon
This was the world God made: order that we can discover, a sanctuary at its heart, a priestly creature of dust and breath, work worth doing, a helpmate for the work, and a day of rest. God himself walked with his creatures in the garden. God constituted our first parents in holiness and justice (the Church's own words for their original state). That is, they shared God's own life and lived in his friendship. But, human nature had not yet been carried into God himself and seated at his right hand. Christ would bring that gift. What God gave in Eden was already wonderful. What God intended was more.
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