Sitting in our local park the other day, I found myself more
than usually moved by the beauty of the river. It is a typical Welsh river,
slightly black from natural peat (not, as in the old days, from coal waste),
flowing swiftly and smoothly and bubbling over the rocks as if it is glad to be
what it is. Here, I thought, is God. I felt I wasn’t contemplating nature and
thinking about the God who created it: I was contemplating God. Not a God who
made the world a long time ago, but a God who is here in this river now, alive
and moving, creating the world anew every moment and rejoicing in it.
As I sat there, a little family of ducks appeared round the
bend of the river. Here too was God, expressed in all the countless forms of
life, each with its own beauty and its place in the world that has evolved
through aeons of time that boggle the mind. Here is the living God.I don’t find it very inspiring to think of God ‘designing’ this world, as in the hymn that says:
‘Jesus is
Lord, creation’s voice proclaims it,
For by by his power each tree and flower was planned and
made.’
For a start, that is a rather literal understanding of the
idea that Jesus is the incarnation of the Word through which ‘all things were
made’. But I find it just as difficult to think of God ‘planning and making’
like a designer with a drawing board. In fact, how much of the universe is
‘planned’ at all? Its development seems to be haphazard: the formation of
galaxies, stars and planets; the evolution of life by chance mutations and the
survival of the fittest; and the whole mixed-up story of the human race, not to
mention each of our individual lives; it all seems to me to be a mixture of the
random and the ordered, of untidiness and beauty. Scientists are now saying
that there is chaos everywhere, and yet there are patterns even in the chaos.
The universe, even if not completely random, is open-ended. The end has not
been fixed from the beginning, even assuming that there is an end and a
beginning.
To me, to worship God as ‘Maker of heaven and earth’ is not
a matter of believing a doctrine. It is a matter of being overwhelmed by the wonder
and the mystery of it all: not of thinking about God as a separate being who
created the world, but just rejoicing in the world. I love the title of Richard
Dawkins’s latest book, even though if it’s anything like The God Delusion I’m sure I wouldn’t agree with its content. The Magic of Reality – that’s what I
believe in!
