Have you ever had someone say to you, "And who do you think you are?" Well, today God is saying that to Job. Job has been taking a stab at playing God. He has been giving his explanation of why things are the way they are, and it seems that God can no longer remain silent, so God says to Job: "Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?" God is challenging Job, telling him very clearly that Job is not God.

At times we don't have enough respect for the mystery of God. Many of us feel uncomfortable when we come up against things that we can't fully understand. (This can be especially true for men who like to think they can figure everything out.) We think that with enough words and enough time we can fairly well figure out who God is and what God is like. But God is far beyond our human understanding. God is not there to be understood, dissected, and figured out. God is there to be wondered at. You may find this shocking but the Catholic Catechism tells us that "concerning God we cannot grasp what (God) is, but only what (God) is not, and how other beings stand in relation to (God)" (Par. 43). Our stance then is to be one who is capable of wonder.

When we stand before a roaring ocean, or on top of a gigantic mountain, we stand in wonder. When we hold a tiny baby in our arms or look closely at a beautiful flower, we stand in wonder.

St. Augustine gives us these thoughtful words: Question the beauty of the earth, question the beauty of the sea, question the beauty of the air distending and diffusing itself, question the beauty of the sky...question all these realities. All respond, "See, we are beautiful." Their beauty is a profession. These beauties are subject to change. Who made them if not the Beautiful One who is not subject to change?

In today's Gospel, Jesus calms the terrifying wind and the raging sea. Then St. Mark tells us: And they were filled with great awe and said to one another, "Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?"

Jesus, through his actions, is making a demand for faith in God both as one who takes care of us and as one who is the Source of all creation.

"Creation not only exists, it also discharges truth...Wisdom requires surrender, verging on the mystical, of a person to the glory of existence"  (Gerhard Von Rad). Creation should lead to the Creator. It has the ability, if we allow it, to bring us to awe and adoration of God. We have different ways of approaching God and we must learn to use all of them. One of them is through the scriptures, another through reason and another through the heart. It is this last one that today's scriptures urge us to use. To bring the heart into contact with creation can be an experience of God that is open to us each day of our lives. At times it may be more profound or more moving, such as when we are face to face with the great wonders of creation, such as oceans, mountains, earthquakes, forests and other wonderful things. At those times we may find ourselves overwhelmed by the power and the beauty of what God has done and is doing. When we are in those places we should allow ourselves to feel all that we are capable of, and know that we are experiencing something of God when we see how God is reflected in what God has made. We are then experiencing God's creative energy.

However, in our day-to-day experiences, we also constantly experience God's creative energy. Are not our own bodies marvels of what God has done? Some small daily attention to ourselves as bodily beings would keep God's creative energy in our consciousness.

This wonder and awe at God's creative energy and God's creation not only leads us to God. It also leads us to a deep respect for all of God's creation including other men and women. We come to see that all of creation is a way of God revealing himself to us. And so we come to appreciate and love all things and people. This, of course, will have a profound effect on the way that we treat things and people. The deeper the realization that we are all God’s works of art, the more we will appreciate the oneness of all things and people. This will in turn make it much more difficult to treat others and things in a sinful way. Our sense of oneness will move us to respect and wonder as we face God's creation whether found in humans, non-humans or even in inanimate objects. Everyone and everything will call forth our reverence and respect.

I pray that our wonder and respect for all of God's creation will grow deeper and deeper.