 |
| Astronaut Dr. David Bowman in 2001: A Space Odyssey |
Control is fun. Starting at a young age, every one of us wants more of it over more aspects of our lives. We begin to pick out our own clothes, decide what we want to eat, and, with our first tricycle, discover the thrill of plotting the course of our own journey. The pangs of anxiety that come with increased control as we fret over more significant decisions like whether to ask someone out on a date or which university to choose are quickly quelled by the sheer fun of the myriad smaller acts of control that decorate our lives. It's fun to customize our laptops with stickers and curate our own music lists online. Sooner or later, however, we discover that the pressures of control are no longer outweighed by the joys, and the best that many hope for is to keep the pressures and joys in balance. We play the stress of controlling our finances off against the pleasure of choosing where to go on vacation. Yet there is something far better and far more freeing, but it requires a bit of imagination and getting lost.
The Imagination of God
God created human beings in His own image. Jesus is the Imago Dei, the image of God in its fullness. Part of what it means for us to be made in the image of this image-making God is that we, too, are gifted with great imaginations. We think things up out of nothing and bring them into reality. From Michelangelo's David to the internal combustion engine to Mozart's Requiem to the James Webb Space Telescope, we really are quite imaginative creatures, and it will take all the imagination we have to approach a certain truth about God. He is infinite.
Aristotle says that there must be something that causes other things to move that is not itself moved by anything else, the unmoved mover (ἔστι τι ὃ οὐ κινούμενον κινεῖ, Metaphysics 12.1072a). Think of it this way. You are grilling hot dogs around a nice campfire, but what caused there to be fire in that particular fire pit? You struck match and put it under a log. But where did the log come from? It came from the tree that had stood nearby. Where did the tree come from? It came from a seed. How did the seed get there? A bird dropped it. Where did the bird get it, and for that matter, where did the bird come from? You see where this is going. At some point the whole thing gets ridiculous and you have to think, "There has to be a stopping point somewhere," and that stopping point is what Aristotle called the unmoved mover. Picking up from Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas says this unmoved mover is God. (Therefore it is necessary to come to some first mover that is moved by no other, and this everyone understands to be God. Ergo necesse est devenire ad aliquod primum movens, quod a nullo movetur, et hoc omnes intelligunt Deum. Summa Theologiae 1, Q2, A3)
Now kick back and just let your mind go. What could it possibly be like, what could it possibly mean for something to exist that has no cause? Let your mind drift. Use a piece of art or perhaps something like the famous stargate scene in the classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
"God is the fullness of Being and of every perfection, without origin and without end. All creatures receive all that they are and have from him; but he alone is his very being, and he is of himself everything that he is" (CCC 213). On the surface, that really doesn't make sense, but the liberating thing is that it doesn't have to. As you begin to stretch your imagine to conceive of the inconceivable, an infinite being without beginning or end, you get lost in that notion. You realize that you can't get your head around such a thing, much less control it, and in that moment you take your first taste of freedom.
Realizing Fatherhood
As the infomercials used to say, but wait! There's more! Despite having no beginning and no end, God is also personal, which is to say, He is a person. No, He is not human, but what it means to be a human person comes from the personhood of God, and if that still sounds a bit too abstract, God is our Father. What follows is something I journaled recently after pondering the identity of God.
When God speaks to Moses from the burning bush and says, "I am the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob," and then reveals his name as YHWH, "I Am," He is truly inviting us into an infinitely larger reality, identity, and relationship than the mud-hut-dwelling, dirt-scratching experience of life and family that we have known with our blood relatives. What would life be like if we look up from our meagre existence and truly saw our Father and knew we were His?
You may think my description of earthly, familial relationships is harsh and inaccurate, but consider that the largest mansion and the smallest mobile home are essentially the same thing. They are both boxes made of stuff from the earth in which people sleep and eat. And just as we must scratch the dirt with hands or tools in order to draw anything of value from it for sustenance, so we often face hard, emotionally backbreaking challenges to interact with family members in order to bring forth the joys of familial life we all know are available.
So, I'll ask again. What would your life look like if you raised your eyes from the problems and hassles that beset you on a daily basis and became lost in the life of your infinite Father, the one who loves you beyond what you or I could ever define the word "love" to mean?
