“Maker of Heaven and earth…”

We’re born into splendor. Whether we first see light in a ghetto or a palace, we see light.

The light we see flooding the front yard at breakfast time left the sun eight minutes earlier, rushing at 186,282 miles a second, to get here. What do we see in its light? Trees and grass, flowers and bumblebees, grazing deer and coiling snakes: the earth is pregnant with wonder. Fireflies, diamonds, moss and nosehairs: we live in a storehouse of treasures.

The Creed says God is “Maker of Heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.” We can see butterflies and waterfalls, but what about those things we can’t see, the realities our senses can’t perceive?

Over the past few centuries we’ve amassed mountains of information about the heavens and the earth. Schoolchildren memorize banal facts that would have beggared the imaginations of Galileo and Kepler. We can graft skin from the back of a cadaver to renew the burned skin of a baby. In the days of Augustus Caesar, the average person died at 28 years; today our life expectancy is 68. Within a few years, people will be vacationing in space.

Collecting facts—even coordinating them to build a car or replace a liver—doesn’t lead to wisdom. We all know the names and something of the careers of Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking, celebrated scientists, famous thinkers and dedicated atheists. They knew much more about the sun than anybody who’ll read these words, but they dismissed as naïve a belief in the Maker of the sun. They “had no need of that hypothesis,” as the French mathematician Pierre-Simon de Laplace replied to Napoleon when asked about God.

Most people wouldn’t go as far as Laplace. Most people, if asked, will say they believe in God. He’s a convenient explanation for things. We need to explain the overwhelming sense we get when we look up at the night sky spangled with stars. God fits the bill. He’s a useful hypothesis.

Over the next few centuries (assuming we don’t destroy ourselves), we’ll continue collecting facts. Facts to make Sagan and Hawking seem like Neanderthals by comparison. But the great and invisible Truths that make it all matter won’t be then—and indeed, can’t ever be—calculated by computers. They’ll never be in science books. They’re the invisible stuff of the Spirit. Here is its most profound Truth:

“And the Catholic Faith is this: that we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity.”

All wisdom, all knowledge, all facts, all life leads to us to God the Trinity or it leads us astray.

All our accumulated knowledge, every scientific discovery, every mathematical calculation advances our species. Medicine can restore lost limbs, renew sight, lengthen our lives and overcome unendurable pain. But none can answer childhood’s constant question: “why?” The answer doesn’t lie in ourselves. It doesn’t even lie in the totality of God’s creation.

The “why” to creation is completely outside creation. Sagan and Hawking and you and I will never find the answer as long as we look in the wrong place.

God made the heavens and the earth. But He is utterly outside them. He is completely different. We’re created, we exist, because He said (and still says) so. He is Uncreated. We exist in time. He does not. St Thomas Aquinas tells us the problem with even talking about God is we have to use words (they’re all we have) to say things about Him, and He’s above the ability of words to describe. No wonder there are atheists. To accept the Trinity is to accept that there is Truth above our capacities.

We’re born into splendor. The splendor around us, though, is a “preparatory” splendor. To discover wonder amidst the butterflies and bees (and scorpions and rattlers), is a necessary step in opening our eyes to the Splendor beyond the ability of our minds to comprehend and a love our hearts can never fathom. An Uncreated Heart beats at the center of all creation. For those who have eyes to see, It is the One Thing Necessary, the fountain to which all wisdom and knowledge lead, and from Whence they come.—Fr Gregory Wilcox