To Be Or Not To Be

 A statue of the Titan god Atlas sits on my desk, a gift from a coworker who vacationed in Rome.  In mythology, Atlas was consigned to bear the sky on his shoulders, so my bronze Atlas is shouldering a large sphere representing the twelve constellations of the zodiac.

I like my statue, for the obvious reason that it is a gift, but also because it serves as a reminder of a much larger gift, one given to everyone and everything that exists:  the gift of being. 

As Atlas holds up the sky, so also God upholds all that exists.   Paul writes in Colossians 1:17 that in God all things are held together and Hebrews 1:3 says that God upholds all things by the word of his power.  It is in God that “we live and move and have our being,” Paul told the Athenian philosophers.  The difference between Atlas and God is that one is performing a task, and an endless one at that, while the other is extending a gift.

What we call existence, the sum of all realities that can be said to have being or becoming, isn’t grounded on necessity, as an ontological determination that could not be otherwise.  It is entirely within the range of possibility that we should never have existed at all.  Nor is being a manifestation which completes what is lacking in God’s nature or fulfills a need in God’s being.  The existence of contingent beings is not required to make God “whole” or “complete”.  Rather, creation is a continual and utterly free expression  of the inexhaustible God who is Love.

The transcendent God of theology and the Christian understanding of God as Trinity, has no deficiencies.  God lacks nothing.  God is complete, and within the Christian understanding of a Trinitarian God, there is nothing lacking even as relatedness and as manifestation of difference.  God’s “identity” has no need of the world and is not completed by an order of contingent existence.  The event of being - for beings - is pure gift.

Our existence arises not from necessity, but from choice.   We were not.  And then we are.  The language of creation is the language of freedom, not the narrow and limited freedom of created beings but the radical and infinite freedom of transcendent Being.  Only in this kind of unhindered liberty is the beauty and majesty of creation, as gift, revealed.

God extends to us the gift of existence itself, the gift of participating in the sublime mystery that awaits us every day, the gift of being.