I ran across this passage in an essay by Mary Harrington in First Things. It's not the main point of her essay but sort of an elaboration of her main point (which is about using Aquinas as a philosophical starting point to stand against what she sees as some of the technocratic excesses of our present age). But I offer this passage as a standalone occasion for contemplation:
I am indebted to the classical scholar Spencer Klavan for explaining to me that ancient Hebrew does not uses tenses as does modern English. So where the English version says "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth," Klavan offers as an English approximation: "At the origin: God, creating heaven and earth." In other words, a work of creation brings things into being, but it is also always active, and always complete. Just so! I look around me at the world springing back to life after winter, and it is easy to see at the origin God, creating heaven and creating earth. Creating form and creating matter.
Every spring, the Resurrection, a historical event which happened many hundreds of years ago, becomes more manifest to me when I see the tulips thrusting through the greening earth, and the lilacs blossoming on the bush in our backyard. Even the "helicopters" gyrating from the heights of our maple tree.
I think people think of things being created and then persisting on their own. I do not. Everything that is still is through that power from attosecond to attosecond. When not distracted by the chaos of modern life, not often, my contemplation of this restores some of the wonder of it all that I felt in my youth.
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