• Gen. 1:26-31;

• Eph. 3: 14-19;

• 1 Jn.4:7-21;

• Lk.7:36-50

• God saw everything that he had made and indeed it was very good... Then God said, "Let us make human kind in our image, according to our likeness." Gen. 1:31 & 26.

The very first meditation St. Francis de Sales proposes to us is on Creation and his reflections emphasize the positive aspect: "God has given you existence from nothingness. He has made you what you are, without having need of you and only because of his goodness. Consider the kind of being God has made you: The first in the visible world, capable of everlasting life and of perfect union with himself (Introduction to Devout Life, Part I, Chapter 9).

God is Love (1 Jn. 4:8). And so, creation is the outpouring of this Love. Creation is in view of Christ. In Salesian thought, Christ is divine goodness fully shared with the human being and, therefore, even if there were no sin, this sharing of divine Love would have been there (cf. Treatise on the Love of God, Book 2, Chapter 4). Here, St. Francis de Sales guides us to have a positive approach towards God, His creation and humanity.

His first phrase that was recorded, and the one remembered so much by the early biographers, was "God and my mother love me so much" (Lajeunie. Vol. 1, p. 23).

Madame Lhuillier relates that his father, having once told him in his tender years, "you must always think of God and of becoming a good man," and then sometime later, seeing him plunged in meditation, asked him, "Well, Francis, what are you thinking of?" "I am thinking of God," was the answer, "and of being a good man" (Lajeunie. Vol. 1, p. 20).

Read: "The Great Book of Nature," in Lajeunie. Vol. 1, pp. 36-38. Constitutions. 80