As a creature, it is of the essence of my nature to fall down in adoration of my Creator. But I am not a mere creature of God, as the canary in the cage who sings His praises without knowing it. I am also a son of God, made to the image of my heavenly Father. The canary has an irrational, mortal soul; I have a soul that is rational and immortal.
God has given me a mind by means of which I can know Him. But in His love of me He does not leave that mind of mine in its merely natural state. Had He done so, I could have known Him, but only very imperfectly. Using my mind, I could reason from the world around me to a belief in and a knowledge of a Creator. I can still do this. But, over and above this natural knowledge, I am now enriched with divine grace, and this gives me a new power to see God and know God even as He sees and knows Himself. To know Him thus is part of the destiny planned for me in heaven.
That is why man's quest for knowledge is insatiable here. He may be a great astronomer, a noted scientist, an explorer. All his discoveries, however worthy of praise, leave him still groping for more. In a sense, the more he knows the less he knows. He is ever conscious that he has only grazed the surface of what is still knowable. He never will find what his mind craves for until that mind is filled with all the knowledge it is capable of having of the infinitely knowable God. "We shall say much and still want words, but the summing of all is that He is all."
Our limited knowledge of the marvels and beauties and secrets of creation is intended to whet our mind's appetite for that allsatisfying knowledge of the Creator, when we shall know Him "as He is in Himself." "Then I shall know even as I am known." I know my family and my friends by looking at their faces. I am destined to look soon into God's face and know Him thus. He is truth, and my mind hungers for the possession of all truth.
God knows Himself in this direct intuitive manner, and because divine grace establishes in my mind an exigence for a like knowledge, I am recreated; my mind is, so to say, a thing remade and is given this power to know God in Himself. That is one reason why I am God's image; my soul is capable of knowing Him in this wondrous manner. Faith is the beginning of this knowledge here, and it will be transformed in heaven into vision.
God has also given me a will by which to love. God, Who knows Himself perfectly, knows that He is the one infinitely perfect Being, worthy of infinite love, worthy of immeasurably more love than all creatures combined could ever give to Him. Just as the mind cannot rest except in knowledge of God, so neither can the longings of the will ever be satisfied except in loving Him.
This, too, is matter of common experience. Man is always restless, always asking for more, until he rests in God. There is immense peace in a fervent monastery for this very reason, that all these men have emptied their hearts of all love except love of God. God occupies the very center of their lives and contentment must follow. On the other hand, there is agitation and striving in the midst of the world's business, because the object of the will, in most cases, is other than God.
These ideas are, admittedly, elementary, or should be, for the Catholic man. But they probably have all the strangeness and unfamiliarity of a complete novelty in the world where we live. They are set down here because they provide the only satisfying answer to the fundamental question "What is man?" This is how man is constituted by his Creator; God planned that his nature should evolve along these lines. As a creature in the order of nature, he owes God profound adoration. As a creature remade by grace, lifted up to a supernatural state, his mind can now attain to a direct knowledge of God and his will to a love of Him impossible without grace.
"God created man to His own image and likeness; to the image of God He created him." This is my dignity. This is true greatness. The supernatural life is a sharing in God's life and, beside this, all else is unsufficing and seems almost puerile. My soul is like a mirror that throws back the rays of the sun and in doing so becomes itself a thing of beauty, a miniature sun.
My God, if I am Your image and likeness, when You look upon me You should see in me a reflection of Yourself. To reflect Your mind and will in my own with everincreasing perfection, let this be my noble ambition, as it is my privilege and my obligation.