Being Catholic Today - Laurence McTaggart

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the ship, though she does do it very well. It could be anyone sober enough to heft the bottle in the right direction. It could also be a machine suitably programmed. Or, why bother with an intervention? Just let the ship slide. In the same way, God the Creator need not be at all like the Father revealed in his Word by the Holy Spirit. It could be any kind of god with sufficient strength to give the big push. Or, the universe might just have happened. The notion of a Creator might just be a useful myth to take us beyond the boundaries of the language of science, the kind of confusion that comes from perplexing questions like ‘what was there before there was anything?’

      The idea of the Christian doctrine of creation is this: behind every happening, every thing, every thought, every action, all movements, is the creating power of God. In gaps between nanoseconds, he sustains it in being. There is only one force in the world, which is the action of God. Nothing happens otherwise.

      Hold on, though. Aren’t we free beings, with choice? What about all the catastrophes and natural disasters; am I saying that God wills those? Am I saying that God is responsible for evil actions by tyrants and people like us? In asking these questions, we are coming to understand what sin is. A sinful act is not sinful primarily because it offends God, or because it infringes some abstract law code. It is sinful because it is an exercise of the power to act, given by God, in an evil way, a way that counts against God’s purpose in creating us.

      Philosophers have argued for centuries – and there is no reason for them to stop – about how it is possible for an all-powerful Creator to have made free creatures. Surely in some remote way, he still has control. This is the nasty bit that hurts. There is nothing in creation that can withstand the power of God, except for one thing, which is a human being saying ‘no’. Why? Because that is how God made it. For some reason, known only to himself, he wanted to make little beings that would accept his love and love him in return. So he gave us the ability to move, act and think for ourselves. If God were like us, he might wish he had not bothered.

      Another doctrine

      It is from thinking like this, however, that we get a glimpse of the inner reality of God. The argument is tricky, and largely unconvincing, because the subject is too big. Nobody expects to be able to divide one by zero, and so we should not be surprised at the mystery and complexity of the doctrine of the Trinity. It is just trying to do what every doctrine does: express in intelligible sentences something that cannot be said, but that our need tells us to be so. Before I state the doctrine, a short passage from the writings of John Paul II illustrates the starting point:

      Man cannot live without love. He remains a being which is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it.

      Redemptor Hominis, 10

      Mothers and fathers have a particular insight into this truth, that we find fullness of life in giving life, in nurturing it, and in setting it free. The question here is why we are like that. God could have made little things that would freely love him in an one-to-one way. I love God, you love God, she loves God … isolated cells of devotion.

      But I love you, too (quite easy, really, if we have not met!); and you love so-and-so, and he loves you, or loves you not. Once you think of it, this is a staggering fact, the most important thing about human beings. The ancient philosophers used to say ‘man is a political animal’, meaning that we are intrinsically, and by nature, interactive in relation to others. If you have never thought about that, think about it now. Nor is it simply true of humanity; the whole creation is promiscuously interactional, though maybe only we have the ability to choose it, or resist it. It need not have been so, except that

      God said, ‘Let us make man in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves, and let them be masters of the fish of the sea, the birds of heaven, the cattle, all the wild beasts and all the reptiles that crawl upon the earth.’ God created man in the image of himself, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them.

      Genesis 1:26–27

      The author of Genesis was so struck by our relational nature that he went as far as can be gone, and said that we are so because God is so, and he made us so because he wanted us to be like him in love. In our nature is found a reflection of the nature of God. A shorthand idea is needed to express what is meant by something relational by nature with a power to choose. If we call this entity a ‘person’, then we have acquired the first vital concept for expressing a Trinitarian faith. God is personal in this sense. We know this because we are persons, but by creation, and hence by the will of an interactive Creator.

      The second concept follows rather less obviously. I have suggested that creation need not have been interactional at all. It could have been like a tall building divided into one-room flats, each one with a window to the east. We could each have been in different rooms, all looking at the sun, but without awareness of each other, or any means to relate to each other, even if we wanted to. The ancient idea of man as the image of God can then be pressed further. ‘Male and female he created them.’ Humanity is not totally expressed by just the men or just the women, it is a plurality as well as a unity. Nature did not have to be divisible into partitions: we could all have been androgynous, or even non-sexual in nature. That stamp came from God. The Creator is a unity and a plurality.

      One can go further than this still. The image of God, a humanity that is male and female, is part of the interactivity in all of creation. It is not just that men love God and women love God. Human persons were created also to love each other. In the love between a man and a woman, they can give life, share with God in creating a new person. A traditional description of the Holy Spirit comes from this way of thinking: he is the vinculum amoris, the chain of love between Father and Son. Again, we reflect our Creator; two distinct types of person, and their love for each other, giving rise to creation of life.

      Be warned that it is very easy indeed to talk complete rubbish about the Trinity. And it is all rather difficult, even impossible, to understand (and hence to explain!) Like all other doctrines, we are putting into clumsy human words something revealed in Christ, and foreshadowed in the Old Testament. Getting the formulation true to the Christian experience of salvation took many centuries and, sadly, much controversy. If confused, we can take refuge in the Creed that was produced, and which we still say each Sunday. But the doctrine of the Trinity, that God is one God in three Persons, is not a speculation. It comes from making sense of what Christ has done for us, which he himself expressed as a command to baptize ‘in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’ (Matthew 28:19).

      The cunning plan

      If you are feeling completely lost, that is not necessarily bad. Remember that we are awash anyway in the boat on the stormy sea, and have just been joined by Jesus. It is time to say what God’s better idea for us might be. The aim is entirely simple and can be put in a very few words. Nothing does better than the special formula from the Third Eucharistic Prayer which we use at funerals:

      We hope to share in your glory when every tear will be wiped away. On that day we shall see you, our God, as you are. We shall become like you and praise you for ever through Christ our Lord, from whom all good things come.

      God’s solution to our needs and troubles is to restore us to his image. We need to think a little about the problems he faces in doing this. The immediate one is sin. But what is sin? You might have been brought up on lists of sins, some of them attractively mysterious. Don’t lie, don’t be rude, don’t hate, don’t commit adultery. All of these are indeed sinful, but the true nature of sin is something deeper. It is not simply that God gets angry if you do or say the wrong thing. Sin, fundamentally, is a refusal to relate to God.

      No matter how much he loves us, he can give us nothing if we will not accept it. The consequences of this are dire. Imagine a human family in which all the people have decided that the mother is out to poison them. Food is not safe if it is given by her, but it is all right if it is taken for yourself. So each member has to grab what they want for themselves, and as early in the cooking

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