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June 10, 2017This week I was doing dishes, looking out the window over the kitchen sink and noticed a quail hen that died on the back porch. Just walked up on the porch and died. Her mate was by her side, walking back and forth by her body. He wouldn’t leave her. Dennis, the seminarian, went outside and the cock ran away. He took the hen’s body and threw it out under a tree. A short while later, the mate returned to keep vigil. The next day, both were gone. Do you think that is love? Love is willing the good of another. That little quail cock didn’t want to leave his mate. Is that love in some sense?
Mystery and Trinity in Scripture
Life is more than existence. It is the participation in this divine community that is love. That love is written in all of Creation, including quail. St. Paul wrote three decades after Jesus' resurrection, “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all” (2 Cor. 13.14). This blessing attests to the early Church’s experience of the living God. They spoke of the Holy One as the ineffable Creator who created out of love and was infinitely beyond them. Yet, they had encountered him in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth who was part of creation. The presence of God was profoundly active among them in creation through the work of the Holy Spirit. Their experience of God required this kind of language. St. Ireneaus, who lived in the following century, wrote that the Son, the Word of God, and the Spirit, the wisdom of God, were like the Father's two hands molding and enlivening the world.
The Trinity in Creation
The spirit of God permeates all of creation.- There are non-rational forces in nature as evidenced by the laws of physics and evolutionary processes. In the non-rational aspect of nature, there is randomness and chance. Fundamentally, creation is free, in some sense, to shape itself.
- In Creation, their is a rational capacity as evidenced by our human capacity for science, religion, morality, philosophy and other areas of understanding. Human beings freely respond to relationship with God and one another.
- There are irrational forces in Creation as evidenced by our capacity for our misuse of freedom and reason that we call sin.
So what do you think happened to that little quail hen? Did her mate go get his brothers who took her little body and buried it in the family plot with a nice view of our parish? Quails don’t think like that, but we think like that because we participate in divine love in our own human manner. The desire to pair, the desire for community and life are present both in a non-rational and a rational way in God’s creation. The image of the Most Holy Trinity is the experience of life. That little quail does not think about life and death like we do. But we can see God's wisdom in how the quail lives. That makes the story of how we see life and participate in the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ even more amazing.
There are two books I would recommend concerning science, evolution and the presence of God in the Created world. The first is by Dr. Alister McGrath, Ph.D, an Anglican priest and Cambridge professor, entitled Darwinism and the Divine. The second is by a Catholic theologian, Sr. Elizabeth Johnson, CSJ Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love. Both are attempting to speculatively explore territory that has not been adequately dealt with in theology to date. Just click on the title to review the book.
