By Nicholas Soellner
Connecting Creed and Life
Editor’s note: For 2025, the weekly Connecting Faith and Life column will be renamed Connecting Creed and Life. To celebrate the 2025 Jubilee Year and the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, the columns will consist of reflections on the Nicene Creed, corresponding with related paragraphs in the “Catechism of the Catholic Church” (CCC).
“maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible” (CCC 335-373)
Among the many questions I hear from my children, one of the most common is, “Dad, what’s your favorite ____?” Food? That’s easy. Animal? I’m surprised by how hard this is to justify. Luckily, when we ask our Heavenly Father the same question, the answer is more readily available. As the Catechism says, “The hierarchy of creatures is expressed by the order of the “six days,” from the less perfect to the more perfect” (CCC 342). The Maker of Heaven and Earth created humanity on the sixth day, symbolizing God placing humanity at the highest rung of the ladder of creation. But what comes on the seventh day is not another creature, but instead a gift for his highest creature.
“So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all his work which he had done in creation” (Genesis 2:3). In doing so, God shows us what our primary concern ought to be. “Creation was fashioned with a view to the sabbath and therefore for the worship and adoration of God. Worship is inscribed in the order of creation (Cf. Genesis 1:14). As the rule of St. Benedict says, nothing should take precedence over ‘the work of God,’ that is, solemn worship. This indicates the right order of human concerns” (CCC 347).Putting God first and people second sounds simple enough. Yet when we observe the world, it’s clear to see how often society has chosen to put humanity, animals or the planet itself ahead of God instead.
When I was in college, I had the privilege of spending a week on the Navajo reservation in Tohatchi, New Mexico, on an alternative spring break trip. On the second or third day, my friend Billy and I woke up super early to watch the sun rise over the horizon with zero light pollution and then go for a morning run. The community, located in the high desert of the Chuska Mountain Range, was even higher above sea level than Denver and we quickly came to realize how unprepared we were for the thin air. We toughed it out about a quarter mile down to the entry gate, only to drag ourselves back up the hillside completely out of breath. We felt like wimps! It wasn’t that far, so why was this so hard?
Quite often, living our faith can share in this experience. We try to live out what discipleship asks of us, only to be blindsided by how difficult it is to break a bad habit, and then proceed to beat ourselves up for failing so quickly. Because of Original Sin, our existence is similar to always living in the thin mountain air, except we never acclimate. “Original sin entails ‘captivity under the power of him who thenceforth had the power of death, that is, the devil’… This dramatic situation of the whole world which is in the power of the evil one makes man’s life a battle” (CCC 407, 409). This is why Jesus promised to send us the Holy Spirit, which we receive through participating in the sacraments and utilize through daily prayer. It is also precisely why God ordered creation to put his worship first before all things.
Human beings are designed to receive the Ruah of God, his breath, which is the Holy Spirit (Cf. Genesis 2:7; John 20:22; Acts 2:2-4). Just like when the oxygen mask drops from above during a crisis aboard an airplane, we are instructed to secure our mask firstbefore assisting others. This isn’t because we’re supposed to be selfish, but rather our bodies don’t work without breathable air. When we try to rearrange things out of order (literally “disorder”) we inevitably experience a greater vulnerability to sin and often find ourselves lacking the strength to do the good we ought to do, or to avoid the evil we ought not to do (cf. Romans 7:19). Humanity most accurately lives up to being made in the image and likeness of God when keeping our priorities straight, namely, to “love God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:37-39).
Nicholas Soellner is program manager for the Diocese of Evansville Office of Catechesis.