Encore
Morning has
broken, like the first morning
Blackbird has
spoken, like the first bird
Praise for the
singing, praise for the morning
Praise for the
springing fresh from the word
—Eleanor
Farjean
Ever
since I first read G. K. Chesterton’s work, Orthodoxy,
I have been intrigued by the notion that God is still creating the world and
everything in it. Chesterton proposed that just as a child delights in seeing a
thing done again and again, so God delights in the “monotony” and repetition of
creation every day. “It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’
to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be
automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes
every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them...The repetition
in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical ENCORE!”
Is it
possible, then, that every new emergence—every blade of grass, every butterfly,
every billowing cloud—is a new and special creation invented out of God’s
wisdom, excitement and artistry. He paints each pansy as it emerges in the spring,
he colors every leaf in the fall. He ponders every act of creation, shouts
“Encore!” and the whole business begins all over again, the business of creation
that began “in the beginning,” and is still going on to this day.
If then every new emergence is a new creation, it follows that every human conception is a new creation.
God says, “Let us make a human being in our image, according to our
likeness”—and a human life springs into being! We think of the process as natural: we conceive a child and it grows to term on its own. In truth it is
preternatural—creatio ex nihilo as
theologians say: the creation of matter and spirit out of nothing. (It occurs
to me at the same time that any given conception might be God’s final creation,
in which case the human race would very soon be extinct, for our existence,
despite our heroic efforts to perpetuate ourselves, is solely dependent on
God’s creative handiwork.)
Chesterton suggested the idea of on–going creation to me,
but David, Israel’s poet, convinced me, for he describes God first “musing” and
then “weaving” David together in the darkness of his mother’s womb. He did so,
David insists, “before one of them (the various elements that became ‘David’)
came to be (were in existence)” (Psalm 139:13–16).
In other words, God created David out of
nothing—no, out of himself. He imagined the person that was to be, and then
brought that person into being according to a pre–imagined plan. (The Hebrew text
reads, “Your eyes saw my unformed substance and in your book they [David’s
“component parts”] were written day by day before there was one of them.” The
metaphor is that of a “journal” in which God wrote his ideas of what David
would become and then brought each idea into being through his handiwork in the
womb.)
Put another way, we begin as a gleam in our
Heavenly Father’s eye and are shaped by Love into a unique, immediate
creation—immediate in the ordinary sense of “unmediated,” in that we come directly
from the inventive heart and hand of God.
That means that I am special and so are you—and so is
everyone else in the world. This being true I must be pro–life in the purest
sense of the word in that I sanctify all
human life[1]—Stanford
University sophisticates and untutored semi–illiterates; Seattle socialites and
skid–row derelicts, winsome children and doddering curmudgeons, fundamentalist
preachers and left–wing political pundits, anti–abortion enthusiasts and
pro–choice activists. All persons–all classes, ages, sexes, and races–are
unique productions of the Creator’s genius.
Which is why Jesus said we should never call anyone a
“fool.”[2]
DHR
