In the first account of Creation at the very beginning of the Book of Genesis, as God speaks Creation into existence, we read:
And God saw that it was good.
And God saw that it was good.
And God saw that it was good.
In the song of Creation, that is the refrain; all that God creates is good.
He separates light from darkness; it is good.
He separates land from water; it is good.
He creates the plants and animals; it is good.
All is good, until we get to this week’s first reading:
The Lord God said: “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a suitable partner for him.”
In a world of only goodness, Our Lord sees for the first time something that is not good, and what is it? For man to be alone. Why is it not good for man to be alone? None of us was made for isolation.
It is when we are alone that we are often most vulnerable to the attacks of the Evil One (as played out in Genesis 3 for our first parents), and it is after we fall that the same Evil One wants to further isolate us by making us feel that we are the only ones who struggle, or that God wants nothing to do with sinners like us.
We were not made for isolation. The great community of Persons that is the God of the Universe – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – created us in His own image, and that means that we too were made to be part of a community.
We do nothing entirely on our own; our every movement toward God or away from Him either helps or hurts a whole network of people who are tied to us by bonds of family, friendship, work, school, or even just chance encounter.
We exist in such a way that whether we like it or not, we affect people and are affected by them; and God works through that. He allows us to spend much of our lives dependent on the care of others, and much of it caring for those dependent on us. It’s through each other that He forms us into the people He wants us to become.
It is not for the man to be alone. Let us embrace Our Lord’s invitation to live in community with each other, allowing Him to perfect us through each other, and to thereby accept His even more important invitation to live in communion with Him!
Fr. Michael Niemczak, Santa Maria De La Paz Parish in Santa Fe, New Mexico