Theology is a Love Story

( The reflections for August are taken from the first section of Horizons of Hope)

When the planets have all been charted and occupied, the mysteries of God unveiled; when the wisdom of the wise has left no more questions and when all the exploring, discovering, inventing and dreaming are completed, when the maps of life are spread out across the fields of eternal evolution, and the full story of a trillion years of creation is spoken out for the first time, it will be finally clear that all growing is God’s growing, that all healing is God’s healing, that every age was an age of love.

We are living through momentous and divisive moments in the growth of Christianity, particularly as experienced in the Roman Catholic Church. We are called now to read and explore more widely, to discuss and ask questions, to test everything as much as we can. Ideally, such reflection should be a daily habit because love needs to be kept nourished and fresh. There is great excitement and fulfilment in filling our minds and hearts with such vital and delightful matters. This is what imagination is about at its most sublime level.

Through taking time to reflect, to meditate a little, to become more attentive to what is happening around us, personal and universal, we find new shapes, ideas and connections about the wider reaches of our faith and our understanding of the mystery of incarnation. It is about going more deeply into what we already know, rather than searching for new information; more about mindfulness and entering into our experiences than other-worldly propaganda.

Our perception of the mystery of life and love is heightened when we read in a contemplative way. Here and there we pause, we breathe, we wait. This inner resonance and intuition has to take time to reveal and clarify itself, and may require several re-readings. There are no answers – only to keep the channels open, to keep the conversation courageous. Gradually the veil parts – and we are astonished.

The excitement that pervades these pages springs from the belief that a divine healing power is already moving within each of us, and within all of creation. Once this revelation is taken seriously by the churches, and by ourselves, then our efforts for peace and equality, for justice and joy, will spread like wildfire. There is another way of living our days on this troubled earth. We will need many courageous conversations. There may be cul-de-sacs and open highways. And in all our efforts nothing goes to waste – every effort, every set-back, every daily disappointment and mistake, even temptations and sins – all are transformed. All belong. And all are safely harvested.

Billions of years ago an invisible dot of nothingness exploded into everything that is – the infinite cosmos of each tiny heart, the eternal heart of each expanding cosmos. And we somehow knew it was the unfolding of a love-story. We sensed that the Big Bang was the sound of love, and that creation, once molten rock, would one day sing operas.

On planet earth, almost 14 billion years later, another invisible dot of love exploded in a human womb to create and develop a new order of that one being, of that one living love-story.

It was the same dot – the first the kiss of God to impregnate nothingness with divine creation; then much later this love-story evolved in the kiss of two human beings to create a unique divine-human creature. And in the sheer beauty, love and meaning of that astonishing revelation we no longer doubted. Now we knew for sure that our first hunch was right. Creation was the first Incarnation, the first Bible, as St Thomas Aquinas put it. We also began to understand that we ourselves, now, actually are the evolving, incarnate, invincible, visceral embodiment of the love-energy of God, a love-energy that is dedicated, from the very beginning, to grow this earth into heaven! And this sublime, distorted, twisted, ineffable, terrible love-story is only beginning. And we are that love-story.

From its very beginning nearly 14 billion years ago, the world was already permeated and filled with God’s creative and compassionate presence. There never was a time or place in the history of evolution when God was absent from the world. God was always the beating heart of the universe. In the person of Christ the fullness of the tremendous love-story was finally revealed. The human is now the home of the divine. Salvation and healing have taken place. What was begun in Creation is completed in the Incarnation. This long-awaited revelation of a fleshed God has brought a stunning vision to human awareness. The search for God is no longer a dualistic, divisive journey outwards, away from the material, the ‘ordinary’; it is the recognition of what is already throbbing within us. That is what we celebrate in the sacraments – because the immediacy of the incarnate Mother-Creator keeps slipping our doubting minds. We forget. Grace reminds and re-creates us. It is the divine power that energises our daily lives. Grace is life fully lived. God’s basic gift to us is the life we live and the good earth from which we make our living.

As Christians this insight is offered to all of us. And to the rest of the world too, of course. The smallest particle of Creation is a theophany, a revelation of God – the acorn, the shrill siren of a passing train, the falling star, the shining eyes. All too often our seeing stops at appearances, failing to explore and recognise the love and meaning at the core – the very heart of the Christian revelation. We need eyes to read the wind, people’s faces as they pass, the new runway, the old war-memorial in such a way as to go below the surface. But there are moments that stand out from all the others, moments which come like a gift, moments when, as theologian Sean Fagan puts it, ‘the focus shifts and a single leaf becomes a universe, a rock speaks prophecies and a smile transforms a relationship’.

In his Dominum et Vivificantem Pope St John Paul II wrote, ‘The Incarnation signifies the taking up into unity with God not only human nature, but in the human nature, in a sense, everything that is flesh. . . the Incarnation then also has a cosmic significance: the first-born of Creation unites himself in some way with the entire reality of humanity, within the whole of Creation’. It’s over 30 years since that document was written. The ‘cosmic significance’ has now exploded beyond all imagination. In his encyclical Laudato Si’ Pope Francis calls for an ecological conversion, a paradigm shift in our understanding and compassion for all of Creation in the light of Incarnation.

Scientific revelations are radically changing the way we understand and live out our faith. Creation and its evolution are all part of Incarnation. We are called to become familiar with the term ‘the Cosmic Christ’ and to see all evolution and cosmic energy from the first star to the final ending as the work of the Holy Spirit. Evolution, you could say, is intrinsic to Incarnation. It is how Creation, already containing the divine seed, has prepared the necessary ground for the human birthing of God.

The Pope hopes that a ‘new conversation in a new language’ will surely change our wanton neglect of Mother Earth who is God’s incarnate body and our nurturing home. This radical theological shift in our recognition of the divinity of Creation will profoundly transform the whole heart of our faith, our preaching and teaching, our pastoral practices and ministries. It will renew our understanding of church, the sacraments and especially of the Eucharist. It will revolutionise the meaning of grace, of sin, of salvation and contemplation, of how we see the world and its evolution, of how we perceive, adore and deepen our intimacy with God.