Did God Make Me?

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

Here’s a question: what does God, believed by religious traditions the world over to have had a hand in the miracle of human birth, have to do with our own entrance into life? I ask it now for myself, six decades after my first days of exploring the world. My just celebrating a birthday has made me even more reflective and curious.

I ask because, grand and epic and transcendent as the Creator God is, I’m wanting to know that he is not distant, indifferent, or aloof. Those qualities don’t seem to characterize the God my parents believed in, the God of the Christian faith of my upbringing. Nor the God of Trinity I’ve been sizing up in these last few years of trying better to understand who God really is.

I know what I’d prefer to believe: That I’m not a cosmic accident, but that I’ve been made, fashioned out of an even larger love, out of divine delight. Who wouldn’t want to believe that overseeing it all is more than simply random biological happenings?

The alternative is a universal lonely futility. And I have trouble of thinking of anything worse.

Yes, the picture of a personally involved divine presence seems too good some days. And yes, it’s a mystery—the interweaving of a heavenly will with the biochemistry. There’s something startling in linking a heavenly foresight with a squalling baby’s snipped umbilical cord. It’s like star dust mingled with earthly mud.

But still I love the picture of another possibility, what it might mean.

Julian of Norwich, my medieval mentor whose writing gets more vivid to me the older I get, wrote that God “has made everything that is made for love.” I think she meant that God made everything by love, too. Including us. I’m hoping so.

For I am drawn to a God who creates life in general, yes, but also lives as a kind Presence that will continue to show interest in every particular life. It makes sense, doesn’t it? That a relational, interpersonal God would continue relating to and delighting in humankind fashioned out of love.

And as I delve into the Trinity and the idea that such richly relational dimensions represent how God has always been, I glimpse a God already familiar with the delights of eternal intimacy. We get hints of Father, Son, Holy Spirit in happy communion. The act of creation was a collegial affair even in its inception. So let us make, we hear in Genesis of God making humankind, forming Adam and Eve and breathing life into persons he would love.

Let us: It was out of the overflow of God’s trinitarian love and generosity that God was eager to bring It All into being. This is a Being taking joy from what is being made. Just as God was extravagant with other aspects of creation, with humankind too we see an overspill of creative, relational realities.

It has been that picture on display throughout Scripture—God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit taking joy in one another—that began to open me up to this added depth of my making, this idea of the Triune God also delighting in me.

Julian, again: “The Trinity suddenly filled my heart full of the utmost joy, and I understood that … the Trinity is our maker, the Trinity is our protector, the Trinity is our everlasting lover, the Trinity is our unending joy and bliss, through our Lord Jesus Christ.”