WHAT ARE WE SHAPING?

I have posted part of this before, but some further reading has tempted me to do a little revising.

Cruthaitheoir (noun): creator. Cruth (noun): shape. Cruthigh (verb): to create, to shape.

I’ll be honest, I have no idea how to pronounce the Irish Gaelic. Even the net wasn’t much help. Traditionally, when we speak of creation stories we mean that something was brought into existence. But, there can be a second meaning; to bring into a new form. And, since the root word, cruth, means to shape, there is the implication that the Creator is working with something that already exists.

In the Irish mythology that survives, there are no creation myths as we usually understand them. There seem to be no in the beginning there was “nothing” and then there was some “thing.”

The eternally curious scribes in the old Irish monasteries translated, copied and recopied every scrap of paper that came their way. It’s likely that they would have copied a pagan story of creation if they had access to one, even if they reworked it to give it a less pagan emphasis.

Or perhaps, as Tom Cowan author of Yearning for the Wind suggests, the Irish Celts didn’t have an “In the beginning” story. The universe didn’t have to come into
“existence” because it has always existed. If, somehow, the universe has always existed then the Creator has always existed, does exist and will always exist. Creation becomes a reshaping, not a sudden appearance of something out of nothing.

So where did the raw material for reshaping come from? Cowan believes that the raw material comes from the Creator. The ever changing, ever shifting and always becoming universe is the essence of the Creator.

If Creation is made of the stuff of the Creator then all Creation is shared. The birds, the trees, the grasses, the sea, the smallest grain of sand, the smallest seed are part of us and we are part of that Creation. Imagine a world where we respected each other because of our shared Creation. Imagine a world where it would be unthinkable to destroy the natural world because by destroying that world we are destroying ourselves. Imagine a world where human beings act as the co creators we were meant to be instead of the destroyers too many of our businesses and governments have become and claiming that they are committing that destruction in our names.

In the words of Helder Camara late archbishop of Olinda and Recife in northern Brazil “Human beings, who were raised by God to the glory and responsibility of co-creators are destroying nature. Capable of transforming wastes to fertile land, we seem proud of creating deserts.” from Sister Earth: Creation, Ecology and the Sprit.