Words pointing…
Our world is now understood to be a world where something really happens; the whole story of the world need not have been written down in the first quantum like a song on the disk of a phonograph. The whole matter of the world must have been present at the beginning, but the story it has to tell may be written step by step.
…to ask whether God or evolution created life is like asking whether Shakespeare or Hamlet killed Polonius. If there is no Shakespeare, Hamlet’s act is meaningless. It is merely the accidental arrangement of ink on a page. If there is a Shakespeare, however, his existence as the creator of the literary Denmark does not obviate the drama of the play. It is rather a necessary prerequisite for it. Shakespeare, as a playwright, is not a competitor with the drama of the play.
There is a great book: the very appearance of created things. Look above you! Look below you! Note it. Read it. God, whom you want to discover, never wrote that book with ink. Instead He set before your eyes the things that He had made. Can you ask for a louder voice than that? Why, heaven and earth shout to you: “God made me!”
Is “image and likeness” a redundant phrase, or does it mark a distinction? Arguably the latter. To be created in God’s image is to be granted the potentiality for sharing in the divine life, a potentiality that may or may not be actualized and is shared in equally by all human beings without their consent. Likeness, however, results from man’s free actualization of that potentiality. Whereas the image of God is imposed on man, likeness to God is not, but requires the free cooperation of the creature.
One winter evening, when the innovative engineer R. Buckminster Fuller was drinking tea by the fireplace of Prof. Hugh Kenner, three-year-old Lisa Kenner prolonged her bedtime farewell with the question: “Bucky, why is the fire hot?” Kenner writes: Some instinct told Lisa he was the man to ask. His answer, as he took her on his lap, began, like most of his answers, some distance away from the question. “You remember, darling, when the tree was growing in the sunlight?” On arms like upgroping branches, his hands became clusters of leaves as he described their collecting the sunlight, processing its energies into sugars, drawing them down into a stocky trunk. “Then the men cut it down. and and sawed it into logs. And what you see now”—he pointed to the crackling hearth—“is the sunlight, unwinding from the log.”
So every day
I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth
of the ideas of God,
one of which was you.
…by virtue of the Creation and, still more, of the Incarnation,
nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see.
In general, every time you feel in God’s creatures something pleasing and attractive, do not let your attention be arrested by them alone, but, passing them by, transfer your thought to God and say: “O my God, if Thy creations are so full of beauty, delight and joy, how infinitely more full of beauty, delight and joy art thou thyself, Creator of all!”
God, not we, is the source of silence.
Creation is not a one-time event. It is God’s ongoing gift on every level from the humblest quark to the highest stage of consciousness.
Today words no longer arise out of silence, through a creative act of the spirit which gives meaning to language and to the silence, but from other words, from the noise of other words. Neither do they return to the silence but into the noise of other words, to become immersed therein.
As silence is to noise, God is to creation.