'The experience of hunger that is not quickly sated is a good reminder of our
creaturehood.'
Women pretending to be men; men becoming more like women; everyone aping divinity in his desperation to escape
creaturehood? Western youths seeking the Orient; orientals seeking capitalism?
But some of the most important ramifications of the doctrine of the human fall into sin that form the heart of a Christian understanding of culture are that despite the fall man did not lose his
creaturehood, nor did the fall abrogate God's command to "be fruitful and increase in number, fill the earth and subdue it."...
And while philosophy since the Enlightenment has conditioned us to believe "we are what we think" (thanks in large part to Rene Descartes), Augustine's statement positions the seat of human character and
creaturehood in the heart, not the head, suggesting that our proper end is devotion, not cognition.
Imperial eyes/Quarter the ground for fellow
creaturehood:/Small as the hour some hunted terror cries/I go back to my desk.
A sense of creation not only involves belief in the Creator but also embraces
creaturehood as the universal, albeit analogous, condition of all finite reality.
As early as Amos Wilder's 1976 Theopoetic, he emphasized that "the dimension too often missing [from Christianity] is that of rooted-ness,
creaturehood, and embodied humanness." (2) This perspective is held by other theopoetics thinkers as well.
Fourth, and finally, in spite of a sharp difference, there exists between angels (especially Guardian Angels) and humans a heaven-forged sympathy, because our commonality of
creaturehood involves free will, intelligence, love of God and communion in that love, and the very vocation of our angel-guardians is to secure our vocations in love.
Eventually, after Magpie Rising was completed, I was able to work comfortably in poetry out there, in poems with a horizontal pacing flexible enough to stand honorably in the landscape--poems like "Penstemon Bearings," "On Heart River," and "From the Erstwhile Forks of the Grand." And I still make small schematic drawings of rivers snaking across the plains--word-free homage to their elegant
creaturehood.
She argues that all earth beings, and the earth itself, share the same status: "The standing of
creaturehood, which remains beneath all the different forms of being and activity that the inhabitants of the earth exhibit." She goes on to claim that, "If all beings of the earth are valuable as God's creatures, all of them share in this value equally.
They have at one and the same time freed God from bondage to the world-order by asserting the
creaturehood of all that is not God, and have ensured that the statement about the immanence of God firmly excludes any possibility of man's divinization, for man too is explicitly said to be a creature of God.
How can our theology reflect the humility and limit of our
creaturehood, while also honouring the glorious generosity of our Creator who made us with a creative capacity for language and thought to give voice to our faith in community?