I was sitting in a lecture about ‘Prayer and St Thomas Aquinas’ when I had ‘a conversion’. It was not a big moment, but it has stuck in my mind for quite a few years now. The lecturer said that when Thomas ran into a difficulty while writing one of his books, he would get down on his knees and ask God for help. When I heard this, I thought, “That is cheating”. As a student, who had to write assignments for the course, I felt that it was up to me to know the answers. To be asking God to help with the answers seemed to be not right. This was to upset the standard way of doing things.
To learn and come to know things and remember them was the way we were all brought up. Then of course, after school we had to learn other skills in order to find our way in the world. This was the journey for all of us. That was what others were doing and this was the way to become grown up. It depended very much on each of us as an individual. Getting help from God to do all these things was not part of the script. Now and again, we heard that we could pray to God, but somehow that did not lead to the expectation that God would do much for us. Actually, we had to do stuff for God.
Now my thinking has changed. When we say God is our Creator, it means just that. God is the one who brings us into life. God is the one who keeps the blood circulating through our bodies and guides us each and every day of our lives.
God continues to create us, not just us as body plus soul, but in the situations we find ourselves in. God creates the answers that come our way. God provides us with solutions and the people we need to help us. Thomas Aquinas was one of the smartest people you could ever meet, so getting down on his knees and asking for God’s help was smart. He was asking God to create an answer and put it into his head. The thing is, God did.
This idea of God continuing to work in our world, in our small lives, and in our cosmos takes some absorbing. The Church in Australia is in the final stages of the Plenary Council. Here again, there are a lot of people praying, asking God to keep on creating. We are asking God to guide us, inspire us and help us be better missionary disciples. This is what God wants us to be. Our desire and God’s desire are for the same things. We want the People of God to be a sign of unity for the whole world and for the whole world to know that we will find that unity by being in God.
To talk about God like this is not normal in our society in Australia or in New Zealand. For many people it is normal, but somehow most of us have this idea that spiritual things are not real. God is not real in the sense that God is not involved in politics, economics, science or even football.
In our countries, most people are unaware or barely mindful of the fact that the biggest and most important relationship that they have is with the God who created them. They probably did not hear my philosophy professor say that one of the biggest tasks of our lives is to become conscious of the relationships that we are born with.
Yes, we become aware of our relationships with our families, our country and even our earth, but the strongest relationship we are born into is with the one who created and still creates us.
God is a creating God. God is a missionary God. To be a missionary is to be God-like. Jesus came to us with his message of love. He then picked people to be with him so they could learn the message and then send them out. God continues today to pick people to be part of the People of God, which is committed to letting the world know of the creative love of our God.
To be on a mission means that we get out of our chairs and go out to meet people. Maybe we do not need to get on our knees to know this, but praying to our Creator God might help us to do it better. The Spirit is with us, thank God.
Now my thinking has changed. When we say God is our Creator, it means just that. God is the one who brings us into life. God is the one who keeps the blood circulating through our bodies and guides us each and every day of our lives.
Fr Trevor Trotter
Regional Director of Oceania
rdoceania@columban.org.au
Listen to "From the Director - God is the Creator"
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