God looked at everything he had made, and he found it very good. Our first reading today is a continuation of the creation account, part of which we heard yesterday. And it is striking to note that after each creative act, God looked at what had been created and found it to be very good. And underneath the goodness of creation to which the Scripture attests is the vocation of human beings. Human beings have been called to be co-creators with God. And to help us reflect on the vocation of human beings is a concept that we find in St. Bonaventure: creation as a river that flows from God and returns to God. In this flow of creation, humanity holds a special place because it is the task of men and women to lead creation back to God. Men and women do this because they have been created in the image and likeness of God, and also because God put them in charge of creation, as we have heard in our reading today. The river of creation is able to flow back to its creator because there is an image of the trinity in creation. Men and women are thus able to lead creation back to God because they can perceive the image of the creator in them. We are able to see the sacredness of creation.
But there is another non-Bonaventurian reason why men and women can lead creation back to God. It comes from John Paul’s Encyclical,
On Social Concern. According to JP, we can only live up to this task when we retain that image and likeness of God in us. In other words, we can only be able to recognize the sacred nature of creation if we ourselves have retained the “God” in us. As such, only with the eye of God, so to speak, can I be able to treat God’s creation with care since I will treat them as if they were mine, as if I were the creator. But when we lose that ‘God’ in us, we act otherwise. We fail to live to our vocation of being “co-creators,” of being other Gods.