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Affriming
   Our Freedom
in God
The Untold Story of Creation
          
Robert Joyce, Ph.D. explores and integrates the meaning of creation and the origin of evil in an unprecedented way.  New levels for meaning in suffering and joy.

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Afterword


Affirming the Freedom of God and Creatures


          Affirming Our Freedom in God draws meaning and conviction from a simple truth of human life.  Every child needs affirming love in order to flourish as a human being.  The smile of a radiant mother cuddling her baby in her arms can be the single most wholesome experience for that little person's life.  The baby feels welcomed and strengthened in being, not simply valued or treasured.
          This smiling care and affirming love from the mother reaches into the child's unconscious life where the truth of creation reveals the greatest affirmation of all: God's affirming gift of being. 
But the gift was not fully received.  So, God established a family for the fallen person.  Parents provide love and nurture to each child, a dependent person, newly-initiated in space and time.  By their affirming love for the child, the parents participate in the Redemptive Creation as redemptive. 
          By learning to receive this love well, the child participates in a critical reparation.  Within the mind and heart of the little one, there is, also unconsciously, the healing touch of God.  Redeeming love runs as deep as creating love, and is offered to the child unconditionally.
          This eternal love re-calls the little person into the Community of Being, through the love of mother and father, family and friends.  All of the ensuing growth-and-development in this world is rich with increasing opportunities.  The growing person is invited once again to receive the gift of Absolute Creation by participating willingly in the Redemptive Creation through which this person was conceived and born.
          Many infants and growing children, however, are not effectively affirmed by their mothers or fathers and live unaffirmed for a whole lifetime.  Other unaffirmed youngsters experience, somewhere along the line, even in adulthood, a person who is meaningful in their lives and who delights in their being.  As psychiatrist Conrad Baars says in his book, Born Only Once, human beings need an emotional birth that is beyond the physical.  They cannot give this psychic birth to themselves.  They must await the gift from someone else, and be ready to receive it.
          Beyond emotional birth, the Christian faith teaches the need for everyone to be "born again" spiritually.  This affirming action, God loving us as unique persons, can be accompanied by shouts of joy and feelings of spiritual exhilaration, or simply by a quiet receiving.  This "third birth" yields the functional potential for everlasting union with God.
          Thus the conversion of our being calls for three births.  Our mother's giving us physical birth is a major move toward our becoming able to say yes to life and love.  Then, her smile and care may or may not be sufficiently loving, but someone needs to love us well enough emotionally and holistically to give us the second birth, to lift us into the level where a flourishing personality can develop.
          Besides these two natural births, and compensating for their defects, we need the supernatural birth of Divine grace enlivening our souls and bodies.  God alone can give us this spiritual birth, generally through the sacred ministry of the organization of believers established for that purpose.
          If sufficient development does not happen in the course of our brief, temporal life, this process will have to occur, as it were, abruptly upon our death--whether this mortal passing takes place in the mother's womb or after a long life.  A sudden and unprovided death is a tragedy, not because Infinite Love is at fault, but because our maybe condition needs all the yes development it can attain.  We need this be-coming to increase our recovery that ministers to a final act of repentance at the moment of death.  At that moment, on its non-temporal side, when we are again emphatically in the Presence of God, we will either rise beyond or fall back into our passivity.  We will either exercise or abandon completely our purely active ability to love God, ourselves, and all others.
          The untold story of creation is the story of our freedom, its nature, and its consequences.  Affirming Our Freedom in God calls for a deeper reading of the Genesis story of creation --between the lines and within its aura.  The challenge is to get in touch with our being and the truth of our freedom.  We can realize gratefully that we are eternally affirmed, both in being created and in being rescued from our first response.  Finally, the inside story of our freedom profoundly encourages our yes to God and to the entire Community of Being.

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The "Inside
Story" of
Creation
Caution:

This book is written for a rather select group of philosophers and theologians to elicit their comments on the core ideas. It is a forerunner of a larger, much fuller treatment that is forthcoming, entitled God Said Be, We Said Maybe, written for the general reader.