"Consider, O my soul, the circumstances of thy creation. (1) God created me out of His pure love. Had He any need of my existence, or could I be necessary to His happiness? "I have loved thee with an everlasting love" (Jer. 31:3). (2) God created me, and the decree of my creation is eternal like Himself. From eternity, then, God thought of me. I was yet in the abyss of nothingness, and God gave me a place in His thoughts! I was in His mind, and in His heart. "I have loved thee with an everlasting love." (3) God created me, and in creating me preferred me to an infinite number of creatures who were equally possible to Him, and who will forever remain in nothingness. O God, how have I deserved this preference! "I have loved thee with an everlasting love." (4) God created me, and by creation made me the most noble of the creatures of the visible world. My soul is in His image, and all my being bears the stamp, the living stamp of His attributes. (5) Lastly, God created me, and He has continued His creation during every moment of my existence. As many as are the hours and moments of my life, so often does He make me a fresh present of life." — St. Ignatius Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises.
The second line of the Apostles’ Creed states simply that the God we believe in is the “maker of heaven and earth.” The first thing about God we learn from the Creed is that he is a Father, who is in his very nature love. The second thing is that he is the creator. So the question we’re exploring is: What does the Apostles’ Creed mean when it refers to God as “maker of heaven and earth” and what does this have to do with finding meaning in life?
One way to look at this is through the lens of the so-called “Baader-Meinhof effect,” which is that strange happening when a word, a name, or other things that have recently come to your attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly after. It was named in 1994 after the West German Baader-Meinhof gang when a commentator on the St. Paul Pioneer Press online discussion board reported having started to hear the group's name repeatedly after learning about them for the first time.
So you hear a new word, like prestidigitation for instance, and suddenly you hear the word again somewhere else, and then somewhere else. And you may think to yourself: If this word is appearing everywhere, how come I never heard it before? Well, maybe it’s been there all along, but you never knew it. And maybe this has something to do with how we relate to meaning.
We need to be attuned to the meaningful and true and good to be able to pick up what is meaningful and true and good. We need a Baader-Meinhof effect that attunes us, not to a word, but to a particular way of being in and receiving the real.
With that in mind (we’ll come back to this idea towards the end of this post), the most obvious place to start is with the account of creation in Genesis 1, where we might begin to get a sense of the meaning of the idea that God the Father is the “maker of heaven and earth.” While the phrase recalls the whole of the creation account, I’m just going to focus here on a snippet, which points us towards a deeper understanding of how we find meaning in this life of ours:
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” (Genesis 1:1-5)
Before we take this passage beat by beat, a key idea is worth bearing in mind, namely that we are dealing with a poem, not a scientific treatise, which is to say that we’re not concerned here with the mechanics of how the universe was made as much as we are dealing with the meaning of creation. This, at least, is how most Christians in most ages have understood it. Only incredibly recently have lay people started to take the account literally, and such people are, by and large, not well versed in the thinking of the great tradition of the church.
So, let’s get back to the poem, which starts with: “In the beginning …”. It is common for people to think of this line as referring to something that happened once-upon-a-time, long-long-ago. But the way that some early Christians read it was to say that this refers to the “eternal present” since God is outside of/beyond time. So, “In the beginning” means: now and now and now, etc.
Creation is at every moment.
God, as maker, brings everything into existence and, by his presence, sustains its existence. And this brings us to another key idea. God is the God who “… created …”. A foundational thought in the tradition is that God remains unchanged and unchanging (Malachi 3:6; Hebrews 13:8), which is to say that God is, by his very nature, one who creates. If God is up to anything, you can be sure that it is creation, even now, in this very moment. When human beings show up on the scene as being made in God’s image (Genesis 1:26), you can be sure that this is a dead giveaway concerning what it means to be human:
We are meant to be creators, like the one who gives us our existence.
We might ask why God creates, and the answer would have to be this: because it’s who he is. You could say it’s the thing that comes most naturally to him. You could also say that he creates out of his joy and the plenitude of his love.
He creates, as it were, for the hell of it.
The idea here is that creation is, first and foremost, the result of God’s abundant generosity. It is a gift—an idea we’ll get back to shortly.
So, what is God the maker of? The phrase in Genesis, and echoed in the Creed, is “... the heavens and the earth.” There are different ways of interpreting this, of course, but the core idea here is that “heaven” and “earth” are the broadest categories possible and encompass everything that follows. This is to say that God is the maker of everything.
There is nothing that is beyond him.
Suddenly the text takes a dark turn. We learn that “... the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep.” This is a wonderful touch. You would expect that creation begins with sunshine and roses, but instead, it begins with formlessness and emptiness. Note, too, that the thing that is formless and empty is the “earth”—which is another sign that we’re not talking about the Big Bang, but about the state of the world and the meaning of the created order.
Some scholars say that what we have here is an example of what we can call a “functional ontology.” This is a fancy way of saying that creation is not just about bringing stuff into existence but is about its function. It is about making it work towards a particular end. If this reminds you of Chekhov’s gun, from the previous installment, you’re in good company. It’s not good enough for things to just exist: things need to have a point, an aim, a reason for being.
But the reason for being is created out of formlessness and emptiness. Isn’t that amazing? When God creates, he works with the chaos. Creative people know this well: chaos often precedes order and formlessness often comes before form. Don’t fret, then, if you see a lot in your own life that is not ordered: God can work with that.
He is a creator after all, whose “... Spirit … was hovering over the waters.” Waters, here, are a symbol of chaos. And the theme of water comes back repeatedly throughout the Bible, as in the story of Noah and the Flood or the story of Israel, with Moses, looking at the Red Sea. Water is a sign of the state of things waiting for the breath of the Divine to speak; to call things to order.
“And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” The source of meaning is the Word. God tells the wildness of things to calm down. He tells the turbulent waters to be still—something Jesus echoes as a way to hint to his disciples concerning who he is (Mark 4:35-41).
Often, our experience of meaning comes in a word, and in this we echo our maker: when our words are words are life-giving and not life-denigrating (Proverbs 18:21). When God speaks “Light” there is light. There is a deep metaphysical idea here that truth is identical to what is. I other words, and more practically speaking, to find meaning through and in life, we ought to speak the truth as God does. This is part of the idea of Adam naming the animals that we also find in Genesis.
To speak the truth is to echo God’s calling of things into existence and naming them, and then, his discerning of their distinctness from other created things: “God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” For us to find meaning, we need to be able to name things; to find ways to connect our thoughts with truths that we discover.
Then, we find the idea that “God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness.” This is vital: God makes things good. The goodness of creation precedes its further ordering, and its goodness even outlasts the ways that we mess it up. What this means for our seeking of meaning in life is this: our job in seeking the meaning of things is to search for the goodness of created being and to affirm it.
We already then, have a few insights into how the second line from the Apostles’ Creed clues us into life’s meaning. But underpinning this, and coming back to the idea that creation is a gift, is a fundamental discipline for attuning ourselves to God and his meaning for his created world:
Gratitude.
There is enough out there in the world of positive psychology to confirm the importance of this little thing, but it is something that the early Christians regarded as absolutely essential, as we find in the words of Paul: “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you” (1 Thessalonians 5:16–18). And: “Everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving. For it is made holy by the word of God and prayer” (1 Timothy 4:4).
Gratitude’s purpose is to attune ourselves to the gift of creation and the love of the creator by creating a kind of “Baader-Meinhoff effect” of openness to the goodness of being. To be grateful is to open ourselves up to the goodness of God that shines through his good world at every moment. Yes, there are many things in this world and in ourselves that try to work against this sheer goodness, but when we are grateful we are able to begin to counteract the staleness of taking things for granted. Thus, as much as I have already said that it is impossible to find meaning apart from love, it is also impossible to live meaningfully without gratitude.
I think GK Chesterton gets this right at every turn:
“You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.”
Elsewhere he writes: “The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.”And also: “I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.” And then: “When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.” And, lastly: “When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?”
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