During 2024, The World Community for Christian Meditation is exploring the theme ‘Beholding Divine Beauty: And God Saw That It Was Very Good’. As part of this, there will be 10 sessions held online via the WCCM website throughout the year exploring aspects of “Beauty, Goodness and the Act of Creation” in various ways “including art, theology and social justice.” These posts (parts 1 and 2) briefly explore the theme and how it relates to human creativity and meditation.
“And God saw that it was very good”. These words come at the end of the first chapter of the book of Genesis. This chapter tells the story of the first six days of creation.
By the end of day six, all has been done, including the creation of human beings. God sees all that had been done as very good. It is an inherently good Creation from a good God.
Do we know, deep in us, that we and all of nature have fundamentally ‘good bones’? Can we accept that this essential goodness persists despite how we might see and act, how our fellow humanity might see and act, how all our fellow creatures might see and act?
There is the Reality of Goodness, and there is also the reality of how we co-create with God. Contemporary Christian theology speaks of God as creating humanity to be co-creators with God[1], and inviting us to grow in this co-creating role. Growing in this role simply means expressing our created reality as made in the image and likeness of God.
In this way, how we are and how we act can become, over time, more how Divine Love would see and act. The fulfilment of this, of course, is Jesus. His example, as well as the examples of saints today and through the ages, are some of the ways in which human beings have been faithful to the divine invitation to live and act as God would in the circumstances of their lives.
As we walk this way of growing in co-creation with the divine life, we grow in the beholding of divine beauty, that is, being able to see and experience (in our hearts) the beauty of the divine life inherent in all life. The source of life shines through all life.
And we come to see and accept our original goodness, our being made in the image and likeness of God.
In a real sense, how we see is how we create. How our attention is shaped and what we see fundamentally affects how we act, how we practically co-create on this planet.
The genius of meditation is that it allows the divine life in us and all of creation to shape how we see. As this happens, we grow in seeing as God sees, in beholding the divine beauty in all things.
Meditation causes us to deepen in God sight: seeing as God sees.
As this happens, we can grow in the action of God, in the ways the divine life creates. We then might find ourselves ‘doing Gods will’, that is, acting in ways that are faithful to the God life and our own original goodness.
[1] See The Human Factor, by Phillip Hefner (2000, Augsburg Fortress Publishing) for the first exploration of this created co-creator idea.