The idea that the places of this life are created by God rests on the conviction that every created thing--ranging from soils, waters, and clouds, to earthworms, fish, and people--is loved by God. There isn't a single creature that has to exist or is the source of its own being. That anything exists at all is because God wants it to be. If God did not love for something other than God to be, and then make room for it and nurture it, nothing would exist. As the opening poem on creation in scripture (Genesis 1-2:4) sees it, God loves creatures so much that God, while in the midst of creating them, regularly pauses to note how good and fitting their being is. This is a divine love so arresting and profound that it prompts God to observe the first sabbath, which is the hallowed time to relish and delight in the beauty, fertility, and fecundity of everything around. On that first sabbath sunrise, when God looks out on to a freshly made world, what God perceives is God's own love variously made visible, tactile, auditory, fragrant, and nutritious. God's creative activity, we might say, comes to its fulfilment in the Sabbath rest that is so deeply affirmative and joy-inducing that there simply is no other place that God wants to be.

If what I have said of creation is true, then it is crucial that we appreciate that created beings and places are not simply the focus or object of God's love and attention. They are also, and in ways we do not fully understand, the material means and the embodied expressions of divine love. God is often named Emmanuel in scripture, God-with-us. Now we can appreciate why. God is forever wanting to be with creatures because they are the embodied sites through which God's love is always already at work in the world. It may be more accurate to say that God is with-and-within-us, since that does a better job communicating the intimacy of God's presence in creaturely life. No creature is a random or pointless fluke. No creature has ever been devoid of God's affirming presence.

Instead, every creature is precious, a sacred gift worthy of our respect and cherishing. This means that material reality is never to be despised or rejected because in doing so one would also be despising the divine love that is constantly animating and circulating through it. Any and all desires that end with this world being destroyed and left behind are fundamentally confused (at best) or dangerously sick (at worst). Any and all hopes that people might finally escape from this created world to be with God somewhere else are misguided because they forget that this created universe is where God is present and where God's love is active. If you want to be with God, don't look up and away to some destination far beyond the blue. Look down and around, because that is where God is at work and where God wants to be. God does not ever flee from creatures. God abides with them like a gardener attends to her garden, preparing the conditions for fruitful life, and then staying close in the modes of nurture, protection, and celebration.

This is why Simone Weil is right to say that the fundamental human task is to train and join our love with the divine love that daily sustains the life of all the creatures of this earth.