So here is a collage of some of God’s created gifts that I love the very most.
I received an email from a certain friend in which they drew a connection between God’s creation and courtship, and how it is almost as if God was courting her and inviting her into a deeper love and relationship through His creation.
Basically, she’s spot on. 
You see, God’s creation was never an end in itself, but a means to a greater end: relationship with God. All of His many created gifts were and still are signs and evidence of His great love for us. We are not to fall in love with creation, but the Creator.
Creation, I feel, is like an engagement ring (hence my agreement with the courtship connection). Creation is a beautiful gift that is not only for us to enjoy and treasure but is also a symbolic invitation from God to come into a deeper and more intimate relationship with Him. Creation invites us closer to God not as a bribe but as a gift, not to entice or convince us but as a humble offering from a God who very much wants to be united with us in love.
Beauty, especially for me, is a very full experience of this invitation. Beauty takes us out of and beyond ourselves. Have you ever experienced something so beautiful that you felt all tingly, or gasped, or felt lightheaded, or your heart raced, or you felt like crying, etc.? This is your spirit, your very heart trying to reach out toward God through the beautiful created gift that you have just witnessed. I experience this in women especially. Women, I feel, are the height of created beauty and there are women in this world who’s hearts, who’s souls and who’s being literally bring me to my knees because when I see a woman, I know that I am literally seeing God’s own beauty reflected in a mirror of Creation. To me Woman is the closest physical experience I will have of God’s beauty until I meet Him face to face after I fade from this world and enter the next. My friends can attest to those who don’t know me that I get all manner of breathtaken when particular women enter my sight! And it isn’t a matter of lust (again my friends can attest), but more a matter of humility, of admiration, and genuine praise and thanksgiving to God for such a wonderful gift as Eve and all the women who have come after her. For me, Women help me come closer to God.
To some people, knowing this about me makes it seem like entering the religious life is a sort of contradiction. Well, it isn’t: wanting to become a priest does not make me a woman-hater! It merely means I have to learn to love women in a different sort of way than I would if I had felt called by God to marriage. I have to learn how to love women in Christ’s way. In many ways, I have come to love women more by entering this life. But enough about me!
What are some created things that bring you closer to God? What takes your breath away? What takes you outside of yourself and causes you to reach out to God?
The tragic thing about this world (actually, one of the many things) is that we fallen humans often forget the whole purpose of God’s creation and become, in one way or another, idolators. We worship created things. We become utterly dependent on created things. We fall in love with created things. Addiction, obbsession, greed, lust, revenge, envy… all of these things stem from an unbalanced relationship with creation. God’s creation was and is meant to be enjoyed as a gift, it was never meant to replace God.
Another thing to think about: creation is meant to lead us to the Creator. This is important because it helps to bring the whole world into a greater context of an important Christian principle and reality: the Resurrection. Christ has defeated death and promised that those who die in Him will rise again in the fullness of time. Our world, since His own rising, is no longer a world doomed to die but a world transitioning and fading into a greater and truer existence. This world is the bleak and simple seed of another more perfect, glorified and beautiful world yet to come. Love the imperfect in this world not for itself, but because of the flower that it is promised to bloom into!
So many people in our lives live in a way that saddens, angers or frustrates us. There are good people that are wasting their lives with drugs, sex, alcohol, laziness, violence, etc. When we see people like this, it is very easy to look down upon them as lesser or to become angry with them. Instead, I invite you, in the spirit of love Christ encouraged us all to live, to realize that those people have a lot more in common with you than you might think. Those types of people are seeking for the same fulfillment, satisfaction, comfort, pleasure, meaning, purpose and love that we seek with God. A full relationship with God is more fulfilling than any career, more satisfying than any paycheck, more comfortable than any recliner, more pleasurable than any drug or drink, more meaningful than any club’s mission statement, more purposeful than any goal and more loving than any amount of sex a person could ever experience. Yet that desire to be close to God is present in all of us, and it is the person of prayer that finds it most fully. The drug addict and the priest experience the same deep desire to be close with God and to experience satisfaction, but the drug addict has gone about it the wrong way. The addict relies on a created thing not to help bring him closer to God, but to do the work for him. The addict, the alcoholic, the promiscuous person, the obsessed worker, etc. all suffer in the end because of their reliance on a created thing, a finite thing.
FAITH is infinite, so is HOPE and LOVE. God is infinite, and therefore only infinite things will be able to fully allow us to come to Him, though God’s creation, imbued with some of His greatness and love, can help elevate us closer. They cannot, however, take us the entire way. One of the many challenges of the Christian, then, is to seek a balance with God’s creation, neither becoming fully absorbed and dependent upon it nor shunning it completely as evil. Our purpose is not to eat, drink and mate but it is to praise, reverence and serve God. His creation is here to help us in this great purpose, so use and enjoy God’s creation so far as it brings you closer to Him and helps to fulfill your own created purpose; distance yourself from creation so far as it hinders you. Pray, too, for those who are trapped in creation, who are unable to see God through it and mistakingly see it AS God. Pray for them and live as an example for them to follow and love them not for what they are, but who they truly long to be- perfect children of God. Love not the seed for being a seed, but love it for the flower it shall become. These people, this entire world and universe, is fading not into nothing, but it rather is growing into something greater and one day Christ will return and all creation will bloom into its full splendor as it was always meant to! As Christians we must invite others to come along on that journey of growth by praying for others and by living lives that point far beyond ourselves to the God whispering deep within our hearts, “Grow….”
