"All things among themselves possess an order, and this order it the the form that makes the universe like God."

Friday, 1/8/16

On days like today when the readings don’t move me, I fall back on other passages that bring me close to God. Two such passages are Psalm 19 and the first chapter of Genesis.

I am moved by verse one of Psalm 19 where it states, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky proclaims the builder’s craft.”

And, I am moved by Genesis, 1:27 where it states, “God created man in his image, in the divine image he created him.”  

Now, there is a line from Dante’s “Divine Comedy” that gives added strength to those two verses.

Let me remind you of the plot of Dante’s great epic. Dante in his youth had great admiration for a girl named Beatrice. She died at age twenty-three; and when Dante at thirty-five found himself throwing his life away; he began imagining that Beatrice from heaven conceived a plan for redeeming him.

Beatrice called Dante's favorite poet Virgil  forth from Limbo where he had lain since his death centuries earlier. She commissioned Virgil to bring Dante on a long tour through Hell and Purgatory, and then to leave Dante with her in heaven.

When Dante arrived for a preliminary visit on heaven’s shore. there was something that puzzled him about everything he saw there. He found that while it was all new to him, it was also somehow familiar. When he asked Beatrice about what was familiar about heavenly things, she replied,

“All things among themselves possess an order, and this order is the form that makes the universe like God.”

In 1968 when Apollo 8 made its way around the moon, the astronauts  were confident that the orderliness of God’s creation would hold true even there.

I feel I am brought into contact with God when I consider the orderliness of each of the five trillion cells that make up my body. The nucleus of each of my cells contains the millions of atoms in my distinctive DNA that God fashioned in his own image.   

I know a lady who is always humming off key. And since the orderliness of music is another of God's creations, I find there is something ungodly about her humming.