(Watch) The only snippet of Aquinas I understood changed my life forever

I merely wish to offer it to you as a gift, which I sincerely hope gives to you as much as it has given to me.

The one thought that changed everything for me — the way I look at myself, the people around me (including those I find it difficult to be around), the world, the universe, time, existence itself — came from a mere glance over a few lines of text from the great Doctor, Thomas Aquinas, which, if I’m being honest, were the only thing on the page I understood.

I couldn’t get it out of my head. I meditated over it daily at a time when I never meditated over anything, and it burrowed deep into that uncharted territory of my soul, like some spiny sea creature burrows deep into the silt and the sediment of the sea floor.

It’s so simple, yet so incredibly profound, that I find myself sometimes avoiding it out of some beyond-primal, subconscious fear of the implications it presents and the mind-blowingly overwhelming rabbit hole that it can and will lead me down.

Don’t ask me the context, because I don’t know, and please don’t expect an intellectualized unpacking of Aquinas, because I can hardly unpack the tiny, travel sized bag of my own thoughts and feelings. But I merely wish to offer it to you as a gift, which I sincerely hope gives to you as much as it has given to me.

Now this is not a direct quote because I don’t want this to turn into some kind of exercise on Aquinas, which is far above my pay grade, but rather just the sentiment:

Like any masterpiece first starts as an idea in the mind of the artist, you were an idea in the mind of the Divine Artist.

[Pause]

Feel that spiny thing burrowing deep down into your soul? I was / am an idea in the mind of God.

Now I don’t presume to comprehend the mind of God but I do know, at the very least, it is eternal. And that means that long before the earth and the planets and the very first chemical reaction ever reacted, God knew me. God was thinking about, me, eternally. And like any artist knows and loves his greatest masterpiece, from the idea to its completion, so the Divine Artist knows and loves me.

This is where our identity begins. This is who we are.

So the next time we wonder who am I, remember: I was a beloved idea in the mind of God long before the universe existed.

This is part of the series called “The Human Being Fully Alive” found here.