Unlike those antediluvian creation myths of early pagan cults, wherein violence among wrathful deities required placation or bribery often by blood sacrifice, Sacred Scripture is profoundly different. Genesis repeats in joyful chorus the inchoate origin of divine beauty in creation: “…And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.”
The Genesis narrative also records that humans were made to enjoy the company of their Creator and to delight in creation, along with their God. Indeed, even today, peering into the electron microscope, scientists wonder at the tiniest of nanoparticles. The largest of living creatures have their part, too, in sacred creation. Huge sperm whales can dive more than a mile into the black depths of the ocean, then return to the surface for breath and socializing with others of their kind. Positioning their giant heads near the surface and their huge bodies straight upright, whales sleep together perfectly still in pods, like a grove of trees suspended in water and carried along by the tide.
Through out the ages, along with the astrologers and natural scientists, countless artists — authors, poets, hymnists, and painters — continue to co-create with God, who makes all things beautiful in his own time! Even the inanimate rocks praise God in their fossilized remains from 300 million years ago in the Carboniferous Era of creation; nothing is lost in God’s stockpile of eternal love. In perpetual return, the earth-bound bulbs of daffodils push their beauty upwards; through winter’s snow their yellow trumpets rise each year and forever, all proclaiming: “Spring bursts today, / For Christ is risen, and all the earth is at play” [Christina Rosetti].
Yet, beyond the beauty of God in the natural realm, it is in the supernatural dimension where deepest beauty originates. The Gospels, like the great whales, dive into the depths of God’s mercy, and record in all the Biblical narratives the wonder of salvation history. There, in the darkness of the unknown, God’s masterpiece of mercy for humanity is conceived in the Immaculate Conception of Mary, who is a harbinger of the Incarnation, like the Spring daffodil.
The Verbum Dei of Jesus Christ echoes Genesis. In that meeting of divine and human, when the Archangel Gabriel appeared to Mary and by her Fiat, the world was recreated, and the fullness of divine beauty in the human vocation was revealed in its earliest form, the Causa Nostrae Laetitiae. Mary in her Immaculate Conception is truly the cause of our joy, carrying the gestation of both divinity and humanity of the preborn Jesus within her own body.
Jesus, who is Life itself, carries both human and divine natures in himself. The Church, created by Christ’s divine wounds and prepared by Mary’s divine motherhood, invites all people into supernatural life. First, in Baptism, the Church invites people to receive that which cannot be attained on our own, even by our most powerful efforts: an innocence of soul and purified nature, cleansed of toxic residue in our spiritual and genome heritage.
St George Preca wrote a most lovely hymn to our Lady in the “Vestis Honoris”. God chose Mary. If we accept Jesus’s love and honor his holy mother, then the sadness of sin and tyranny of violence can gradually be overcome by his indwelling. “God created mankind in his own image … and it was very good.”
Our Lady, intercede for us.
Ruth D. Lasseter
SDC Associate
Indiana, USA
