God created man in his own image and likeness. Man’s heart was modeled by his hands. In the beginning there was a direct communication between God and man, they could talk face to face in the garden of Eden. However the first man and woman tried to usurp the place of God by imposing their views on what is good and evil and by listening to the voice of the father of lies: “God knows well that the moment you eat of it (the tree of knowledge of good and bad) your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods.” (Gn 3:4-5)
They took the fruit and ate it. This action marked human’s heart; it was wounded by man’s attempt to be like God. The communion and harmony established between God and man was broken, provoking in man a distorted image of his Creator. Why did God not prevent the first man from sinning? “God permits evil in order to draw forth some greater good. Thus St. Paul says, ‘Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, CCC, 412)
Although man disobeyed and lost God’s friendship; the Lord did not abandon him to the power of death. He helped man to seek and to find him. (Cf. Roman Missal, Eucharistic Prayer IV) “The Lord God then called to the man and asked him, “Where are you?” (Gn 3:9) The Lord calls and seeks all men by repeating a question that is imprinted in man’s wounded nature, and resounds deep within his heart: “Where are you?”
“Where are you?” All of man’s life is a response to this question. God who seeks man, and takes the initiative to call first. Along history there have been two ways to reply to that basic question: affirmatively, by following the voice of Christ and walking guided by him, as the greatest light of the world; or simply refusing to answer. A basic precious gift that God gave to man was freedom. Although man is capable, through faith and reason to know and to love God, God stills needs man’s freedom to respond to the basic question: “Where are you?” An affirmative response leads to know and to love God (the source of happiness on earth), therefore to eternal life. A pretension to not listen to God’s question, refusing to reply to his voice leads to invent other gods or to pretend to be like God.
An affirmative response to God’s question
“Where are you?” When God asked this question, Adam responded: “I heard you in the garden.” (Gn 3:10) The phrase “in the garden,” was translated in Latin by the Nova Vulgata Bible, as “in paradiso,” in the paradise. This is the same word used in the Gospel’s story of the good thief, when Jesus tells him from the cross: “Amen, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.” (Lc 23:43)
God continually calls man to come back to paradise; its doors were opened again by Christ. On Easter, Christ became our paschal sacrifice; establishing the unending sacrifice, “he offered himself as a victim for our deliverance and taught us to make this offering in his memory.” (Cf. Roman Missal, Preface of Holy Eucharist I)
The liturgy of Easter Vigil presents very well how this happened; it also shows man’s journey to respond to God’s basic question.
Israel was guided in the desert at night by a column of fire. When we enter in the church at Easter Vigil, all lights are off, except the candle light that symbolizes the new column of fire, the risen Christ.
The Easter Vigil procession “calls to mind Israel’s long journey through the desert towards the promised land, and lastly, it symbolizes the journey of humanity, which in the night of history was seeking light, seeking paradise, seeking true life...” (Cardinal J. Ratzinger, homily for the Mass of Easter Vigil, March 26, 2005)
Adam responded to God in the garden, from which he was later expelled. However, Christ opened again the doors to paradise through his sacrifice. At the last supper, as he sat at the table with his apostles, he offered himself as the spotless lamb, and gave us the memorial of his passion: the Mass.
One of the Offices of the Eastern Catholic Rites presents a connection between the paradise and Mass clearly: “Blessed is Sunday, for on it began creation ... the world’s salvation ... the renewal of the human race. On Sunday heaven and earth rejoiced and the whole universe was filled with light.
Blessed is Sunday, for on it were opened the gates of paradise so that Adam and all the exiles might enter it without fear.” (The Syriac Office of Antioch, vol. VI) When Mass is celebrated, the doors to heaven are opened and we can contemplate in it a glimpse of heaven. We have before our eyes the paradise.
The Mass — what a marvelous moment! In it, man contemplates paradise, the place where he belongs, a place where God wants him to be. Liturgy, therefore, is “the concrete form of hope, which lives in advance the life to come, the only true life, which initiates us into an authentic life — the life of freedom, or intimate union with God. … Thus it would imprint on the seemingly real life of daily existence the mark of future freedom, break open the walls that confine us, and let the light of heaven (paradise) shine down upon earth.” (Cardinal J. Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, Ignatius Press, San Francisco 2008, 14) Liturgy offers us the possibility to walk again in the paradise of true life.
A negative response to God’s basic question
From a philosophical point of view there has been throughout history (especially from Descartes in the 17th century), the pretension to eradicate God’s basic question from man’s heart. Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) represents one example of this mischievous pretension; for him God is only a projection of what man desires to be, but is not. Feuerbach says, man is the origin of religion. Christianity for him, would be reduced to a field of either anthropology, or sociology.
Later on, positivism, represented by Auguste Comte, would apply the “scientific” method to determine the “truth and veracity” of all things. According to it, everything shall be subject to that “method,” everything is put to the test, even God. But it is impossible to put God in the laboratory and put him under the test based only on the Cartesian “scientific” method!
These ideas are present in today’s world and have evolved and mixed with many other ideologies and philosophies going from nihilism to a negative secularism; they show how men have tried in many different ways to obstruct a response to God’s question “Where are you?” In some periods of history, men try to usurp the place of God. “On the one hand, there are philosophies and ideologies, but there are also always more ways of thinking and acting that exalt freedom as the unique principle of the human being, as an alternative to God, and which in this way transform the human being into a god, but an erroneous god who makes arbitrariness his own system of behavior. On the other hand, we have the saints who, in practicing the gospel of charity, account for their hope. They show the true face of God who is love and, at the same time, the authentic face of man, created in the divine image and likeness.” (Pope Benedict XVI, Angelus, Aug. 9, 2009)
What happens on a personal level? How is this negative response reflected concretely in a person? The ever-increasing secularized world has many other ways to usurp the place of God, as the first fathers did. Today’s society wants to make men believe what Feuerbach, and the positivist philosophers, alleged. However, when man obeys the laws of the secularized world, instead of the law of God, he is refusing his happiness, because God’s basic question will never be erased from his heart.
God’s basic question “where are you?” is imprinted in man’s heart. But if he loses the perspective of God, this can happen, “the Lord said to Moses, ‘go down at once to your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt, for they have become depraved. They have soon turned aside from the way I pointed out to them, making for themselves a molten calf and worshiping it.” (Ex 32:7-8) When men lose the perspective of God, they create their own temples, their own “truths,” their own rules; worshiping idols or even worst, worshipping themselves. “Perhaps the most characteristic element of the dominant culture of the secularized West is the diffusion of a form of subjectivism. A type of ‘profession of faith’ in the absolute subjectivity of the individual, disguised as humanism. It is actually self-centered, egoistic, narcissistic, whose only centre is the individual.” (Concluding Document of the Plenary Assembly, “Where is your God? Responding to the Challenge of Unbelief and Religious Indifference Today, 2004)
When man forgets God and tries to supplant him, usurping his right to decide what is good and evil, hell opens on earth. (Ibidem, Pope Benedict XVI) However, when man responds affirmatively to God’s question, by deciding to follow the greatest light, Jesus Christ, and, therefore, walking in the truth through the liturgy, man can be transfigured and the world can be transformed, as Maximus the Confessor stated: “The liturgy is for Maximus … an effective transformation of the world into transfigured, divinized existence.
For that reason, in Maximus’s view the liturgy is ultimately always “cosmic liturgy:” a way of drawing the entire world into the hypostatic union, because both world and liturgy share a christological foundation.” (H. U. von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy, Ignatius Press, San Francisco 2003, 322)