As spring bursts forth and all creation romps in a fit of playfulness, like third graders released for recess after a long morning of math drills, I find myself wondering about God and the created universe. My spiritual journey, which seems to get a yearly divine kick-start with the onset of spring, has always been creation-centered. God as creator of this magnificent world, a playground of deserts and forests and oceans and mountains—those are the landmarks along my spiritual pathway. And on that journey, I am often confronted with the central question of creation: Why? Why creation at all? Why did God create?
Why would God create this immense and awe-inspiring universe in which we live? Is creation something of a divine afterthought? Or is it—as I have come to suspect—one with the very nature of God? Given the existence of God, does creation naturally and inevitably follow? Are God and creation one? Is creation nothing more than—choose your own metaphor here—the verbal expression of God, the opening of the divine arms, the breathing out of God, the birthing forth from God?
And if this is so—if creation is not so much a decision made by God but one with the divine nature—than what does that tell us about God? Perhaps it is this: That even God cannot be alone. That a God without creation to share the divine presence with is a very lonely God.
Genesis reports that it is not good for man to be alone, and we know that that is true of woman also. Could it also be true of God? Is it not good for God to be alone?
I suspect that the central message of the created universe is that God is a relational God, that God’s very nature is to extend outward, and that the created universe is the visible sign of that extension, our omnipresent sacrament. And, ultimately, that it is our responsibility to respond to God’s extension of Self through creation by extending ourselves to others as sign’s of God’s presence in their lives.
It is not good for God—or you or me or anyone else—to be alone. We are made to connect.