God Our Creator

"For it was you who created my being,
knit me together in my mother's womb.
I thank you for the wonder of my being,
for the wonders of all creation." (Psalm 139)

According to sociologist Norbert Wiley, "The infant is born non-symbolic and without a self, though [in normal cases] it does have the pre-conditions for acquiring one. The parents, however -to view them at their best -see baby as a self from the beginning, talking as though he or she can understand them and finding meaning in baby before any is there... Broadly speaking the parents are communicating two things to baby: "We love you" and "You are there." They are pouring love and also existence into their baby. Or, in more technical terms, they are giving "recognition" and selfhood to the child."

I was touched by tha fact that our self is created by the free outpouring of love of our parents, or caregivers. Wiley goes on to say that development of the self "comes a lot more slowly if the love and recognition are thin, for these are the foundations of baby's trust."

If we are created in the image of God, perhaps we can read off the way our self is born something about God, namely that God's act of creation was the result of an outpouring of love. St. John tells us that, "We love because he first loved us;" (1 Jn 4, 19) perhaps we can say: "We exist because he first loved us." God as our Father, our brother, and the Spirit, continues to express to us the same things that brought us into being "We love you" and "You are there."

Wiley explains that engaging in "role-taking" and emerging from it as a self is not easy for the baby. "It is more peaceful and effortless to remain silent and symbiotic." The emergence of self of the baby is reinforced by the parents. "the parents are saying take a shot at it, smile, be cute, make little noises with your mouth, and we'll love you no matter how you do it. We'll mirror what you do, possibly with some minor corrections or suggestions, but no matter how you do it, we'll applaud you."

Throughout the psalms and the prophets there are instances in which God speaks of himself in this nurturing and caring attitude. Yet several people, even some believers, have a problem in believing in a God who is love given all the suffering and evil in the world. Joan Chittister quotes Einstein as saying, “God is subtle but not malicious.” She comments on Einstein, "Well, perhaps ... but such subtlety and goodwill were hardly visible to the human eye, hardly arguable to those who were suffering the evil they were told was meant simply to test their fidelity or to try their character. Such subtlety, in fact, is barely sustainable without the eye of blind faith in the light of the injustices and struggles of the real world around us."

Chittister believes that perhaps our notion of God is misguided. She says we need to develop a new notion of God as creator given the current knowledge about creation. From a mechanistic understanding of the universe, most of us inherited a notion of a God who set in motion a planned universe, and then stepped back except for few exceptions.

The new scientific discoveries in the human sciences and biology reveal to us that creation is not mechanistic. These scientific insights can give us a better glimpse of what kind of creator God is. Chittister believes that our current scientific understanding leads us to believe in a "God who shares power and waits for the best from us and provides for what we need to make it happen. We become participants in the process of life and the development of the world that is not so much planned as it is enabled. As nature grows, experiments, unfolds, selects and adapts, so then must we. Growth, not perfection, becomes the purpose of life. Ongoing creation, not predestined fate, becomes the purpose of life."

"The very process of human growth, not human puppetry in the hands of a disinterested and demanding God, becomes the purpose of life. And God becomes the God of a universe on its way to growing into glory, of becoming one with its creator. Life ceases to be a program of expectations tied up in a black box, the purpose of which is to tease us into unlocking and unraveling the mystery of our lives before it gets to be too late to achieve it."

"God is the one who stands by as we grow from one self to another, from one level of insight to another, from one age and awareness to another. God, we come to understand, is not the God of fixed determinations now... God, we come to see in the model that is evolutionary, is promise and possibility and forever emerging life."

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Chittister, Joan. National Catholic Reporter: "The God who beckons"
Wiley, Norbert. Symbolic Interaction. "The Self as Self-Fulfillin Prophecy"

The views here posted are my own, and not necessarily those of my province or of the Order.

Carlos J. Medina