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By Bishop fulton j. sheenkJIs the C ismo!- FrustratedThe mystery is heightened as we read the story of Creation in the first verse of Genesis, the pas- -, *When God made: the universe He wrote- his autograph on everything He created. Mountains spoke of His Power, the sunset of His Be\moon: “In the beginning God created the heavens(plural) and the earth”. Now comes the shock! Inflowers of His Wisdomter^ ^ r—___rearth was a formless void- — T '* »There was darkness over-the deep, And God’s Spirit hovered over the water.’’Thisis almosthave been * the language thing material bespoke tman introduced prose, o: dullness.like saying; “Mother made an Angel Cake.. It fell and became a mess, or even a Devil’s Food.”tG4- *Anti-Creation(IWe may ever* say that G with. aJftivine Sense” oLHumpr. Humor is the ability to “see through things”, to glimpse the Creator through creation, the Invisible through the visible, the Artist through the work of His brush and rent like a windowpane; it becameopaque like a curtain. Men no longer saw God “through things”; they saw only things. Seriousness took over. Gold was just gold; sex was just sex: stars were just stars.*But whatever^ur visionGod than to us. It is or *Talk about a generation gap! Here isecreat gap! We Just cannot imagine God mating- something and then immediately sqging it so dlsorcter-ed, that .it took the Spirit* hovering oveorvitl like a bird, to begin its reordering. The first vet*seread from the pulpit of a space ship affirmed that Someone had to be the L imate'of everything in Space, and faith added to this the confession that God created the universe. But while they were saying it, the astronauts looked down on a burnt out hearth and an ashen corpse, a clinker in thealmdst repulsive aftervoyaging-gyer 200,001 nit. While s»me fingertip“The astronauts looked down on a burnt-out moon, an ashen.' corpse,, a clinker in the furnace of space that was almost repulsive after, voyaging over 200,000 miles to get a glimpse of It.”wa ahnaa NatiirA, if ahnsfls us: -With “traitoroustrueness and loyal deceit”, it is fickle to us and true to Him. Everything that is, whether on this earth or in space, bears the memory of.the Pi-. vine Command: “Let there be”. 7surface, why was it like a desert in space, a 1 Sahara? Why was the universe a “formless 1 or what the Hebrew calls a “waste and void ?”•. Putting the two verses together; the first verseGodi Mt w ^seems creative, but the second seems anti-cre-ative. It is almost like turning from ShakespearettrlG'erfrude^Bteih- As there eeihs tor e amx-In a previous article -we said that as4ime progresses God gradually removes two veils: one the mystery of His Love for man, especially in Hisenfleshment and His continuing Life arid Truth in the Church; the other veil He removed was fromNature, allowing our age-toseehowHe~put thingstogether*. To no other age was it given to pull **apart toys to see what makes the wheels go round.gravity in space, is there not also something anti in creation? As our moder world is full of negation and protest, does not the cosmos itself seem^ to have something of that “letus-be-against-it” spirit? No adequate explanation is^it to say that there was not yet life and order, mat only a stateof nebula or chaotic-gases. f— _ — , rper His plan for saving man, so only to our Western. Civilization did He unlock the wisdom to split the “unsplittable atom” at the lower end of the spectrum and to scan, the stars at the other, making the planets legible.The text almost seems to suggest that someone •spoiled God’s work:- Is not this exactly-what we find in the creation of man? God made him, then man introduced ego supremacy into his nature by an abuse of freedom. God then,had to remake him in the Incarnation and the Spirit hovered over Mary, as it hovered over the void of creation. ~Grateful to God we must be for His two Revela-tions: one in the area of faith, the Other in the area of science. Really, it is not Nature that opens the door to God; it is God Who opens the door to Nature. That is why we are scientific today,, It is not because we are. smarter than Aristotle or Heraclitus; it is only that God opened new doors, pulled. up curtains' and unlocked certain treasures which to other ages were still sealed. America was always here; Columbus did not make it. The atom was always toe source of power. Paraphrasing what is said of the revelation of faith we may say: “When in foriher times God spoke to our forefathers, lie spoke in fragmentary and varied fashion” through alchemists and astrologers. “But in this final age, He Has spoken to us” through the3K tlIf humanity had a fall which made every heart chaotic, did creation also have a fall? It does seem that what was first fair became marred and blasted; a light was quenched and darkness reigned. The mystery of the chaos in creation is heightened by the fact that, as Isaiah said, “God did not make the earth a formless void (or “waste—and void”). (45/17) If God did not, who did? Thesame word TOHU that is used in Genesis 1/2 is‘ * ••used by Isaiah. ’ .lt;1Complexes in SpaceThere is order enough in the cosmos to discover the Mind.behind it. “His invisible attributes, that is tosay ms everlasting#Did someone throw a monkey wrench into the machinery of Creation so that earthquakes on earth are matched by celestial pyrotechnics, as if a fireworks^ factory had blown up? Who struck the soilr note which upset the Whole orchestra so that the director had to ask for a re-play? One day the universe will be without disharmony,(Appc. 21/4) implying that it is not so now. The existence of sorrow and evil, counter-workings of spaces and useless Bfeserts like the moon, suggestthebeen visible ever since the world began, to the eye of reason in the things He has made”. (Rom. 1/26)some “prince of the power of the air” (Eph, 2/2).f *But is (here not some disorder in the universe? Was it once poetry and now it» * s Because this anti-God force exists through theuniverse, the ultimate happiness of man requiresa new cosmos: “The heavens:will disappoar in a? Does outer»space seem to have undergone some kind of con-bui/our hopes are set, not on these, but' on the new heavens and the new earth which He hastsa-ctny i-Mija ry awened to the heart of man? We know that on earthus,not perfect harmony.live.” (2 Peter 3/10: Apoc. 20/11; Matt. 5/10). Huxley once cautioned Darwin about his belief that nature never makes a jump. Oyid, the pre-Christian poet, on the—eontraryy-believed—thatiatastmphes made great, changes in the cosmosIn his work, fittingly called” “MetamorphosesThe SpotterrBut how, was disorder introduced into order? Howwwas the vase made by the Divine Potter cracked? Why didof the Giarden of Eden? Did man become cracked?Tie wrote, “When, the earth, covered with mud from a flood, became heated by the hot and genial' We know what caused this present frustrationforms of life, some ancient, some new and strange”. Darwin saw catastrophe!' as the chiefand give? an impulse to temptation. Before manturned liberty into license and issued his “Declaration of Independence” from God, .under the im-today generally. agree that there Have been catastrophes in .the evolutio) of planets as well as life.ptflse of 'evil, did, not evil pre-exist him? Could there have b^nUin-the-univerae a war betweenImmanuel Velikovsky, iri his “Earth in Up-heavalVputs it in picturesque language: “The past of mankind must now be viewed in the light of ’ the experience of Hiroshima and 116 longer from the portholes of the Beagle” (The name of the ship in which Charles Darwin, as a young naturalist, made bis voyage around the globe ) The universe, as well as man on this tiny earth, are not as theyplight to be. .Something' has 'happened toVboth.There are discprds in the‘Universe fust as there are ^complexes in the heart of man. Planets bombard one another as man does violence to bisr .v-vLv * * . x *brother.1 /good and evil -previous to-rnankind’s conflict?“Then a war broke out., in heaven. Michael and his-angels waged, war upon therdragon. The dra-t II a « a * t . lt;■ • m ^ 1 k mgon and his angels fought, but they had not the strength bo win, and no foothold was left for them in heaven. So the great dragon was thrown down,that serpent of old that led the||e name is Satan oF the ti rown(Apoc, 12/7-9) Vastray.-.yvh!''down to the earth and his angels with*San an Angel of Light, the Son _of ;tbe Morning” (Is. 14/12) fall without disturbing “the uni-- •/(ContinuedonPage8f-4* -\
Newspaper Details
Rochester Courier Journal
Rochester, New York, US
Fri, Jan 17, 1969
Page 15
Full Page
Clipped by
Jenell J.
USA 23 Feb 2023
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