God, the Creator of this universe and far more, isn’t a lunatic speaking mere syllables strung together. God is rational and all-knowing. When He speaks, He knows. When He speaks, what He says is true, already or in some state of development. When He chooses to know something about contingent being in an active way, He speaks and what He knows comes into existence, not as a result of some magical words but rather as the flip side of the coin of speaking. He is our Creator, our Father if we choose to be His children in the fullest sense, our Brother if we choose Christ, our teacher and source of spiritual energy if we open ourselves to the Holy Spirit.
To speak with God, we need to be open to Creation, open also to the Spirit, but we need to know of what we speak. To speak with God, we must know as God knows, however faint and imperfect and ineffective our knowledge is compared to that of God. And we have to realize the knowledge we can gain by our own efforts (always working with God as a child works with an adult) is knowledge of Creation, of specific realms of thoughts manifested by God as various sorts of created being.
To speak with God is to accept His self-revelation in terms drawn from Creation and to understand Creation in those same terms, Creation’s own terms. I’ve noted often that St. Thomas Aquinas told us this:
[J]ust as a disciple reaches an understanding of the teacher’s wisdom by the words he hears from him, so man can reach an understanding of God’s wisdom by examining the creatures He made… (St. Thomas Aquinas’ commentary on “1 Corinthians”.)
To speak (along) with God, we must know something, in our minds or in our bodies. God doesn’t speak gibberish, though He seems to at least tolerate a lot of silly sorts of humor in poetry and songs. He seems to allow us our jokes and our good-natured satire, perhaps even tolerates the sarcasm and bitter satire we sometimes feel necessary to direct at those we see as exploitive or destructive because of their stupidity or misdirected greed.
On the whole, we can guess that this universe and its inhabitants are moving in a direction that suits the purposes of the all-powerful and all-knowing God. We need to learn how to speak and act as God speaks and His words become reality, the story which is this world, a story ordered to the purposes of the Almighty.
God demands more from us, His people, than mere piety in face of a confusing and dangerous world. He demands of us that we, as individuals, play our parts and some have roles related to exploring, some to explaining and narrating what has been discovered by the explorers, some to teaching what has been learned to the children and the adults who have not been given the particular gifts of the intellect or of narration, some to other tasks equally important such as managing the infrastructure of society or nurturing the children.
We each should use our gifts for the good of ourselves, our immediate loved ones, our immediate not-loved ones, and all men of good will. We should even try to bring those not of good will into a better state — if we have that calling and the opportunities.
When God speaks, what He says is true or begins to emerge as true. When we speak, we more often describe what God has done, but we also can speak in a way that helps God’s will to emerge in this world. Our acts, our doing, should be part of our imitating God’s acts of speaking. We are weak but not totally without power.
The question arises:
Why would God have made the world as I describe it, incomplete and developing in time, developing in such a way that the emerging good is often obscured or even nearly invisible while the innocent and the good suffer just as often?
Perhaps God made the world this way, made this particular world within this more general but still particular Creation, because He loves us, including that human being — Jesus Christ — who is the human nature taken up by the Son of God? We human beings are creatures of this developing world, this world in which the good emerges through ugly processes we often describe as ‘evil’. It says something about us, a mixture of good and bad, that we are creatures of such a world but it says something unequivocally good about us that we can emerge from this world and — by the grace of God, the loving action of God — become creatures capable of sharing the life of the Son of God, our Lord Jesus Christ.
We have always to remember it isn’t our choice what sort of world this be, what sort of Creation it be part of. It isn’t our choice what roles we select from. Even when it comes to matters which are subject to our choices, we are limited to those options given us by our Creator. If we are to be rational and moral creatures, if we are to form rational and moral communities, we must study and understand our complex world as it emerges to our perceptions and our probing intellects. We must deliberately work to form those rational and moral communities or God will move on and raise new men from the stones of the field. More likely, we and the next few generations will suffer because of our lack of faith, our lack of concern for the world as God created it and not as we imagine it to be for the sake of our lazy and morally passive selves.
If we in the West have failed to such an extent that a century or more will be needed for morally healthy societies centered upon God to develop, then we can still move towards a recovery by working to better understand and imitate what God has done and what He is doing. First, we must have something substantial to say. Or to do. For there seems to be no difference between doing and speaking for the Creator, a claim that leads to a different understanding of revelation than is held by most Christians and perhaps most others as well. We also must know and do at the same time and there is only one way to do that: our knowing must correspond to our best understanding of God’s acts-of-being as Creator and our doing must correspond to our knowing.