God Who Created All Things

Agathla Peak, Northeastern Arizona, 7100 feet

Some thoughts on the mystery hidden from ages past in God who created all things…

My family and I recently spent a week on vacation touring a little bit of the American southwest. We covered a little over 1,500 miles in a week, and as we drove along admiring God’s creation, I had some time to reflect. One of the highlights of the trip for me was Monument Valley in northern Arizona and the Valley of the Gods is southern Utah. There’s something about the immensity of this land, the sheer size and beauty and emptiness of it, that evokes a sense of wonder and of the spiritual.

As we went along, we would occasionally pass a solitary dwelling, or a small group of dwellings, and then we’d cover vast stretches before coming upon another. I thought of the Native American peoples who eked out a living in this harsh, dry land for centuries and centuries before the first Spanish explorers and missionaries came. I imagined them looking out across the towering rock formations and the great sky, perhaps sitting in front of their hogans at night and marveling at the countless stars twinkling in the sky. These native peoples were a deeply spiritual people; they possessed an instinctive awareness of the eternal, and from looking at creation itself, they knew in their hearts that there was a power greater than themselves…

“For what can be known about God is evident to them, because God made it evident to them. Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made…”
--Romans 1: 19&20

These Native Americans never heard of the God of Abraham or the name of Jesus the Nazorean, and so they looked to nature to form their spiritual beliefs. When we visited Mesa Verde in Colorado, we sat in the ancient cliff dwellings, and the ranger there told us the creation story of the Pueblo Indians. As I pondered on these things, I knew a certain understanding.

At times in my life, I’ve been troubled by this: if there is one God, why are there so many different religions? When I was a young man, I wondered what made the Christian religion I’d been brought up in any more true than any other religion. And when I couldn’t find any satisfactory answer, I declared that all religions were just myths made up by people to explain things they didn’t understand. Many years later, someone told me that religion was our human way of reaching for God, and the person of Jesus was God’s way of reaching back to us humans. At the time, I didn’t understand it; it sounded like a rationalization to me. But that day I looked out on the Valley of the Gods, I understood that it was true.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us that the desire to know God is written on the human heart:

“As the deer longs for streams of water, so my soul longs for you, O God.
My being thirsts for God, the living God. When can I go and see the face of God?”
--Psalms 42: 2&3


“…My heart and flesh cry out for the living God.”
--Psalm 84: 3

God speaks to us in many ways—through His creation, in our hearts, and in the words of Sacred Scripture. This past week, as I was pondering on these things, He surprised me in the first reading for Wednesday, October 25th, in the words of the Apostle Paul:

“Brothers and sisters: You have heard of the stewardship of God’s grace that was given to me for your benefit, namely, that the mystery was made known to me by revelation, as I have written briefly earlier. When you read this you can understand my insight into the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to human beings in other generations as it has now been revealed to his holy Apostles and prophets by the Spirit, that the Gentiles are coheirs, members of the same Body, and copartners in the promise in Christ Jesus through the Gospel.
Of this I became a minister by the gift of God’s grace that was granted me in accord with the exercise of his power. To me, the very least of all the holy ones, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the inscrutable riches of Christ, and to bring to light for all what is the plan of the mystery hidden from ages past in God who created all things, so that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the Church to the principalities and authorities in the heavens. This was according to the eternal purpose
that he accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord, in whom we have boldness of speech and confidence of access through faith in him.”
--Ephesians 3: 2-12