Is It Our Job to Renew the Face of the Earth?

Within the "known" universe, there are about 27 trillion stars for every person. If you want to do the math, it's about 20 sextillion stars divided by about eight billion people. I'd say at least one habitable planet, on average, revolves around each of these stars. Or, if not a habitable planet, there's likely at least---on average---one celestial body of some kind within each star's solar system that we may someday have the tech to transform into a habitable place.

In other words, the universe is a practically infinite frontier for humanity. In fact, I'd venture to say it is infinite. It was seen as out of reach for most of our history, but it's not as out of reach today as it once was.

God gave us the most valuable resource in the known universe; that is, an intellect. With it, we can imitate our creator. We can co-create. That's a word we need to use more often, co-create. It means we can creatively use the materials of God's creation, break them down and build new things with them, and see how things are made down to the very quarks in an atom.

It means we can break material down to particles and build it back up again into something else that was formerly nothing but an idea in our minds.

In these ways and more, we alone---among all other things God created---are like God. We’re never going to be able to create like God. Even those things we co-create we only do so thanks to the faculties God gave us, like our intellect and our hands, but our ability to co-create makes us more like him than anything else in the universe.

We can now even break down our own ideas and tell a computer to re-create them: artificial intelligence. We can now tell a machine exactly what to build and it will build it: 3D printers. We're building spacecraft to go to Mars. Everyday we're getting closer to a Star-Trek level society.

I'm not saying Gene Roddenberry was prophetic, but he at least had a positive vision for humanity's future. What happened to that vision? For some reason, sci-fi stories today are dystopian. They have a bleak vision of our future where, often, the earth is not only not prospering but is destroyed.

Not too long ago, that was not the fate we were preparing for humanity to experience. Perhaps we believe it's better to prepare for the worst? Well, then we should be like Pharaoh when Joseph told him to fill up his granaries, if bad times are coming. That's not what we seem to be doing, though. We seem to be giving up in despair, or growing lazy in our decadence, or some morbid combination of the two.

When I look up at the stars, I see light. For centuries, light has been a symbol for goodness and hope. It's energy. Space is mostly dark, but there are 27 billion lights up there for every person on earth. That should give us an infinite number of reasons to have hope. Our hope depends on us, because if we have a bleak outlook for humanity's future, then that's the future we'll get.

The noble duty of every person is to live a virtuous life, so that all around him can believe humanity is good enough to fight for, to fight not only for its survival but its prosperity. We all have an intrinsic understanding and desire for what is good, what is true, what is beautiful. Whether or not these deepest desires have a more tangible identity in Jesus Christ, who knows? I believe they do, because it helps me find them. If my deepest desires are a person, I just need to find him and follow him in order to find them.

Is he going to the stars though, or somewhere else entirely? The apostle Thomas asked, "Master, we do not know where you are going, how can we know the way?", and Jesus replied, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." Jesus knew we, with our inquisitive minds, would always be searching and would always have questions and doubts, like Thomas. That is why he gave us answers in his own flesh and blood. It's not that Jesus simply claimed to be the answer to our deepest questions. He came to earth, lived and died among us to bring to life---for us corporal beings---the eternal living answer to the questions we've always had and always will have.

So, the way, the truth and the life are all one person. That makes sense because there's no more vivid way to experience these things. I know the right way to go in life when I see someone else leading by example. The truth rings clearest when I hear someone I know and love say it. And nothing gives greater glory to the mystery of life than a human life well-lived. Christ chooses to abide in us when we choose to follow him, so when we experience the way, the truth and the life through another person we are encountering him. The incarnate life of Christ on earth was the Second Person of the Trinity in the flesh, but that same person can live through us when we let him.

What else could the way, the truth, and the life be? We fool ourselves when we imagine these things being anything other than a person, the person Jesus Christ.

So, when this truth speaks, listen. That sounds easy enough. Only, it's not. When he says the earth and heavens will fade away, does he mean new ones will take their place? Or will the new heaven and new earth simply be a renewed heaven and a renewed earth, like the earth after the Flood, like Jesus' resurrected body? If so, is it partially our job to renew creation, then?

Christ has no body but ours, St. Teresa of Avila said. Is it now our job to renew the face of the earth, as sons and daughters of God? The prayer goes, "Send forth your spirit, Lord, and you shall renew the face of the earth." Well, God has chosen us to be his vessels as he renews creation. Many people believe the Second Coming will happen in some great catastrophe. I believe God is constantly renewing the earth through us though, like he is constantly renewing us individually when we surrender our lives to him in this ongoing conversion we call life.

I believe humanity is coming out of a dark age of its soul. For a few centuries now, we've been suspicious of our own societies. Is society intrinsically a good thing? Well, history has shown that a prosperous society almost always grows too comfortable and then becomes lazy and decadent. I believe our suspicions about society began when our society started becoming too comfortable, because that is when corruption started seeping in.

Society isn't intrinsically good or bad, but one that gets too comfortable needs to return to its primeval roots as much as possible. We need to learn how to hunt and camp and make fire, and learn how to be truly independent again, because our massive interdependence only masks our dependence; but I think many of us are beginning to notice that we do not really live in a free society, and that it's our own fault. We freely bought all the comforts available to us wholesale, and now we are no longer free.

Why did this post come to be about freedom? Well, because only a free people can renew the face of the earth. Only free people exhibit the creative courage necessary to prune all that is bad in society, salvage what is good, and rebuild a better world. I hope that, with each rebirth, whatever we end up building ends up being better than what we had before, as God renews the face of the earth through us. Maybe then, or maybe even before the earth is renewed again, we will break out of this cocoon of a planet filled with new life ready to inhabit the stars.

Or, maybe we'll all go to an afterlife that exists nowhere within this physical realm that is fallen and probably always will be fallen. I don't know. It's all such a mystery. I can't answer any of my own questions, but I also can't help but wonder about them. All I can do is live as virtuous of a life as I can, and hope God reveals to me at least my next step. That's all I have the mind or willpower to step into anyway.

"In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place of God in the Spirit." Ephesians 2:22

Photo by Nathan Anderson on Unsplash

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