48. God’s action and presence in all things
48. GOD’S ACTION AND PRESENCE IN ALL THINGS
How can I find God in all things? Where is He?
Both reason and faith bind us to say that creatures are kept in being by God . . . For the being of every creature depends on God, so that not for a moment could it subsist, but would fall into nothingness, were it not kept in being by the operation of the divine power . . .
This is made clear as follows: Every effect depends on its cause . . . the air does not continue to be lit up, even for a moment, when the sun ceases to act upon it. . . . Now every creature may be compared to God as the air is to the sun which enlightens it. For as the sun possesses light by its nature, and as the air is enlightened by sharing the sun’s nature (as light), so God alone is Being by virtue of His own essence, since His essence is His existence; whereas every creature has being (existence) by participation, so that its essence is not its existence.
Therefore, as Augustine says, If the ruling power of God were withdrawn from His creatures, their nature would at once cease (to exist) and all nature would collapse (I,104,1).
Therefore we can find God everywhere, because being is everywhere.
Human beings are not everywhere, and we can find God more richly in human beings than in sub-human beings. Living things are not everywhere, and we can find God more richly in living beings than in beings that lack life. But being is everywhere, in every grain of sand and subatomic particle. So we can find God in every grain of sand—because He is really there, acting, keeping it in being, saying “Be!” to it right now, in this present moment. To our human consciousness in time, God created the universe almost 14 billion years ago (the “Big Bang”); but in the mind of the timeless God, He is creating it right now. When an author says “Let it be!” to his novel, he says that to every event in the novel, to the whole novel. He is outside it, as God is outside the universe; but the author is also in every word of his story, as God is in every grain of sand.
In one version of Hindu theology, Brahman, the supreme God, falls asleep every kalpa cycle (every 28 billion years), and the whole universe is created, as He manifest Himself as Vishnu the Creator, because it is only His dream. Then, He wakes up and manifests Himself as Shiva the Destroyer, and the whole universe ceases to exist, because it is only His dream. In Christian theology, the universe is real: God does not dream it; He creates it out of nothing. But there too, everything would disappear if God stopped loving it into existence.
We can love all things that exist, just because they exist, because God does. We can meet Him in a grain of sand, because He is really there, giving being to it. We are never alone. We share humanity with all humans, animal feelings with all animals, life with all plants, and existence with all existing things. And God is the source of all these things. We are never alone, unless we are in Hell. Sartre is exactly wrong when he famously says “Hell is other people.” Hell is precisely the absence of all others, beginning with God. We are always part of the community of creatures, the communion of saints. Even grains of sand are something like tiny saints, because they are His.