"What are we that you should care for us?" the psalmist asks God. The question is still a good one but the answers to it have shifted from age to age.

 

When Renaissance artists turned to Greece for inspiration, they left a lesson to the art world that went far beyond the artistic styles of the past. But most of all, they modeled a way of going through life, as well.

 

Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, for instance, makes a bold theological statement: The bond between God and Adam in this great work of art was clearly not based on submission. God reaches out to Adam to call him to life and to deputize him to bring that life to fullness. Adam, in one great glance of God, becomes bearer of the life of God.

 

Creation becomes then as much a call to human agency as it is an instrument of God's will. In this rendering of the relationship between God and humankind, the human being is not weak and sinful and groveling. The human being, strong and virile, is created to be partner with God in the human enterprise. The human being rises to continue the work of God. Michelangelo proclaims in full color and almost lifelike vigor that to be created is to be called to responsibility, to competency, to effectiveness.

 

Without doubt, in Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, is the rising awareness of the exalted quality of the human spirit. This new notion of the dignity of humanity shines like a monument to the newly emerging humanism of the age. At the same time, the exaltation of classical theology's awareness that the power of humanity lies in the fact that the spark that brought it to life belongs not to itself but to God, remains a constant here.

 

As Michelangelo paints, the human spirit pulses with an unfolding awareness of itself. In this new theological moment, the human being begins to be seen as partner not slave, powerful not weak, capable of grandeur and called to greatness. Creation shimmers with possibility.

 

And now it's happening again.

     —from The Monastic Way by Joan Chittister