Baby Finches
It is at times like these – when millions of people and animals and plants and trees and oceans are devastated and thousands have died – that we wonder about God the creator.
Even on days when there haven’t been recent disasters, when I do retreats and workshops or preach sermons on ecospirituality (our spiritual life and creation,) during which I try to bring to people’s attention our connection with the wonder of creation, people often say to me, “But God created a world with earthquakes and tornados too.”
Indeed; this observation is worthy of contemplation.
Creation is a splendid and miraculous thing. There have been moments, millions of years ago, when it was on the verge of extinction, but, by some unexpected occurrence, conditions changed and the universe took on new life. For some, this certainly seems like evidence of divine action. As one friend of mine says, it’s not difficult to look at tiny baby finches and have confidence that the author of creation will ultimately provide.
(There are those who think that God will rescue us from the current destruction of Earth’s health. I think, instead, that God is calling us to accept our responsibility as part of the web of life. I suspect Earth will survive for a long time; that the question is whether humans will be a part of it.)
As splendidly beautiful and miraculous as creation is, there is no denying that it is also a deadly place. Humans surely know that by now – none of us will live here forever.
For religious people, no matter what the religion, we have to find God in it all. It’s easy for me to focus on God in the beauty of creation. As I walked out this morning to feed the cats and dogs, I was blissfully breathing in the smell of rain and the cool air and the wet grass from the three-quarters inch of rain that fell during the night. I called the cats, marveling at the tenderness of the face of a young one, still frightened of my footsteps. Just then, the dogs took off to the west corner of the coral, barking crazily and running as if their lives depended on it. As I scooped food into the pans, I heard a blood-curdling, stomach-sickening, guttural cry of pain from some creature that the dogs had attacked. And there it is: creation – the beautiful and the violent; life and death.
It’s easy for us to see God in the rain when we need rain (and when we’ve been begging for rain.) And it’s impossible for me to see God as causing a typhoon. So how do I reconcile that?
I think it requires new ways of understanding God, and that’s such a frightening thing to do that most of us don’t. We cling to what we’ve always thought, even if, were we to let ourselves think it through, there may be giant holes in the logic. Times of abject suffering due to the laws of nature and the mistakes of humans can be critical occasions for courageous reflection.
At the moment, we must take action to help the devastated ones in Myanmar and China. Too, perhaps we will have the courage and trust to consider God in all this.
For me, I have to start with three things: God is in it all; God is love; God may be involved differently than what I have believed up to this point. Oh – and a fourth thing: God will take me gently into new revelations.
