We as creatures live a type of hypostatic union with our Creator.
We have our soul and God’s Spirit that animates our soul. We have our will and God’s will that not only conceived but also sustains our existence. We have our personality—our personhood—and God’s own Divine Life forming within us as a result of baptism and our continued cooperation with His grace.
We are two distinct beings—God, the cause of my life, and I—living together in a mysterious union. It is a union that supports and gives continuous life to my whole humanity—body, soul and spirit—without the acute awareness of a God operating in the background.
God generates all life, all creation, from his Eternal Being. And it is by the power of his Will that all creation continues. Because God’s Will is the principle of all life, He is closer to each one of us than we are to ourselves.
If this is so, then why don’t we feel or overtly sense God’s presence? This is a great mystery. We are talking about the secrets of God—of Life and life.
In the beginning, God and man were in a full and continuous spiritual/sensible communion. Adam felt it, knew it; he was keenly aware of God. As we know, that changed when the first parents ruptured that union by choosing a course apart from God.
Today, we are all at different levels of relating to God, including no conscious relationship at all or outright rebellion. In spite of that fact, God draws each one of us to Himself by degrees, with each of us coming to an awareness of Him (or not) along a unique path.
Central to our experience of God is our will, which determines our disposition. We have the freedom to choose and act. To decide what type of life we will live. To seek out our Creator or focus only on our material world. And God will not violate that freedom. He will not take back the gift of our free will, a gift so generous and accessible that we have yet to fathom its real value.
Though there are no strings attached, part and parcel of having a free will is accepting personal responsibility for and the consequences of our actions. In our fallen world, that means living with the suffering that results from our own bad choices as well as those of others.
We use our wills so poorly at times, so covertly and perversely, so selfishly. And yet God, in one sense, stays with us. He continues to communicate in a familiar way with those who cooperate with his grace, forming his own Divine Life within. To those who have taken matters into their own hands, with barely a nod to their Creator, He continues to sustain their lives with love and the hope they will finally seek and recognize Him.
You could say that God is a humble—and often silent—servant. Though Divine, He does not overshadow our existence or impose his Will on ours. No matter how much we mess up, he rains down and shines his love on us.
In one, ontological sense, He never separates from us. He watches and is connected to our every move. Further, He dynamically responds—in real time, as we say—with a corresponding and very precise action, always with the objective of saving us, his children, from eternal separation.
God’s love is a long-term strategy that never exhausts itself. It performs a Divine Calculus, constantly measuring—and adjusting its response to—our changing disposition, thoughts and actions—accounting for and anticipating all the variables of our will, as well as the eternal enemy’s. And He does this with all of us simultaneously, effortlessly.
The Father loves us, and always has. He has loved us from eternity. He has loved us into being. And He wants nothing more than to share the fullness and intensity of his love and glory with us for all eternity.