One of the things our youth have conveyed to our new youth director is their desire for catechesis before college. Training before we ship them off to college, just enough so that when they first hear about Nietzsche or really study Darwin they won’t freak out and presume that what the Church taught them in 6th grade confirmation is the only wisdom the Church has to offer.
Knowing most folks won’t read long boring books, I’ve been working on writing a catechism, a distillation of the faith into concise questions and answers with brief supporting scriptures that could be the starting point for a conversation.
You can find the previous posts here.
Here are questions 18-21
I. The Father:
18. Is God Indifferent Towards Us?
Of course not.
A person’s act of being as well as every action done by a person is an act of God. So, if the creator is the reason for everything that is, there can be no actual being which does not have the creator as its center holding it in being always.
So God literally cares more for us than we can conceive. Our compassion is a feeble attempt to be what God is all the time.
“Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?” – Psalm 139
19. What Do We Mean that God is Love?
If everything is contingent such that its existence is not necessary but relies, at every moment, relies upon God for its existence, then everything in your life, at every second of your life, is a something that could be nothing. Without God.
So everything, everything in your life, every moment of your life- existence itself- is completely gratuitous.
It’s a gift. Grace.
“I have come that you may have life and have it abundantly.” – John 10.10
20. How Can God Possibly Love Us Creatures?
The gulf between Creator and creature is so great it would seem that God cannot love us in any meaningful way.
Yet Jesus affirms repeatedly that God loves him and through the Holy Spirit we are incorporated into the Father’s loving relationship with the Son.
So God can’t love us. God can only love us in the Son through the Spirit.
“Anyone who loves me my Father will love him…” – John 14.23
21. How has God Shown Love for Us?
Creation itself is a revelation of God’s love for it’s completely gratuitous. God reveals God’s love by giving us life, by responding to the crosses we build with resurrection and by taking us up into God’s own life through the Holy Spirit.
And if everything in existence is grace, then God, in his nature, is Love. Not: God is loving. God is Love.
And if God is Love, then the universe’s blueprint, its grain, its logic is Love.
“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God…” -John 1.1
