Day 77 Reality or Nothingness
by Ernest O’Neill

The Creator made us unique parts of his only Son so that we could know him, become like him, and develop the earth.  Through this work we know what he is like, and through the broken world we know what he is not like.

Our astro-physicists tell us that space is expanding into infinite time.  Our Maker wants live beings like his only Son – not robots – to live there with Him forever.  So he has given us freedom to have an existence in the universe – after this short life on earth (which we have desecrated and which starkly contrasts with the earth he has renewed outside time in his son’s cosmic resurrection).

Only by knowing what God is and what he is not can we eventually grow up into the fullness of Christ in whom we were made.  God is infinite and perfect so he has an innate concept of absolute truth: we can only approximate to that knowledge by comparing (delimiting) one thing with another: here we need to see what he is – compared with what he is not – as we experience what we have made of this world and how he has renewed it in Christ. Our Maker wants us to understand him and his ways, so he makes the ‘nothingness’ of this chaotic world possible but simultaneously makes it new outside time in his Son’s resurrection.  Thus we can begin our infinite, eternal life in the universe in the real freedom of beings that know by experience what God is like and what God is not like and thus affirm reality rather than nothingness.

Nothingness is everything that God is not – God is kind and patient and compassionate – but these words and attitudes begin to affect our inner attitude to life and others only as we see them contradicted and expressed in their opposites of unkindness, impatience, and insensitivity.  Similarly, we perceive deviousness when we are able to recognize candid transparency.  We begin to know what humility is when we see through modesty.  We begin to love towards a right concept of love only as we see the fickleness of affection.  We understand a little more about consistency when we confront the willfulness of stubbornness.  Faith in the active love of God is different from submission to blind impersonal fate.  Trust in God’s mercy is different from hope that he will overlook your short-comings.  Lively contentment with God’s providence is not the same as wearied acceptance of events.