Of Beasts and Beauty

The Hubble Telescope is 25 years old.  In that time, it has allowed us to see further and more clearly across our universe than ever before, and revealed the incredible, mind boggling beauty of creation.

It is a very common to hear people asking some variation of ‘If there is a God, why is there evil in the world’, or ‘If God is good, why would He allow evil’?  These are very valid and important questions, and I’ve made my own fumbling attempts to answer them according to my own understanding.

However, it has occurred to me that this may be a very wrong-headed way of looking at things.  People generally focus on the negatives.  The glass is half empty far more often than it is half full, and by and large we love nothing better than having a good moan.  Focussing on the negatives can be beneficial, since it allows us to see what is wrong, and therefore what needs correcting, what needs improving, what needs removing.  However, it can also lead to us forgetting the positives, wallowing in despair and depression, shaking our little fists and demanding to know what kind of God would allow, or worse create, such a state of affairs.

What if we reversed the question?  ‘If there’s no God, why is there good in the world?’  How about, ‘If God is evil, why would He allow good?’  Why is there goodness?  Why is there beauty?  Many good things can, if one wishes to do so (and I don’t), be explained away in materialistic, evolutionary terms.  Love, even the selfless, self-sacrificing love of agapé, can be construed as improving the survival of a community.  Charity speaks for itself.  Hope keeps individuals alive when despair would claim them.  Faith can be used to increase group cohesion.  These are all things that we, as mere human animals, could have developed purely for utilitarian, functional reasons.

But what about beauty?  I struggle to think of any reason why humans should have an innate sense of beauty.  I’m not talking about human beauty, since again the evolutionary pressures for this are fairly obvious.  But why would we find a sunset beautiful?  A waterfall?  A rainbow?  The incredible images sent to us by the Hubble Telescope?  It seems to me that the ancient ape-person sitting staring at a sunset in awestruck rapture will very soon be staring at the inside of a no-longer very hungry leopard.  Do the sheep and cows that stand and stare look at their world and wonder at its amazing and majestic beauty.  I speak neither ovine or bovine to ask them, but I have not seen anything to indicate it.

Why should there be so much beauty in the world?  Or rather, why is it that we, odd little ape-things that we are, should find things beautiful?  What is it in us that responds to the majesty of nature, the wonders of creation, that drives us to try and capture them in paintings and photographs and poems and songs?  Art and music can be waved away as things that draw us closer together, increase group cohesion and social ties and improve group survivability, but not what inspires them; the incredible longing, the appreciation, the ability to stare in awesome wonder.

Should we ignore the bad and focus only on the good?  Of course not.  Evil has functions of its own, helping us to strive towards, and to be, something better than we are.  We must not forget the bad, but let us also not forget the good.

Two of my favourite hymns start by glorying in the beauty of the world.

Yes God is good.

In Earth and Sky,

In ocean depths

And spreading wood,

Ten thousand voices

Seem to cry,

God made us all,

And God is good!

In and/or of the World

Last year, the BBC ran a story about children who were taught using the Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) system, a highly fundamentalist educational programme used by a small number of faith schools, and by home learners, mostly in the USA but also in Britain.  I meant to write a post about it at the time, but forgot to.  I kept the link however, and decided to address it at a later date.  That day is today.

I don’t wish to discuss the programme itself, although I will say that I consider it unhealthy and unhelpful at best, and I certainly don’t hold with their literalist interpretation of scripture.  It has always been my opinion that there is no better way to manufacture hardened atheists than to smother and saturate children with religion from an early age, which is why I don’t necessarily approve of ‘faith schools’ generally.  On the other hand, I strongly support the concept of specifically and vociferously atheist schools for almost exactly the same reason, since it seems to me that they will be wonderful for producing enquiring, thinking theists.

What I actually want to write about is a quote from the BBC story, from a former student and strong critic of the ACE programme:

“It leaves them [children] grossly unprepared for the real world. They have a view of society and people which is unrealistic, which doesn't match or fit any of the norms of society.”

Well, fair enough I suppose, and I daresay he's correct, but is that really a bad thing?  After all, we are being constantly informed that we live in a consumer-driven, financially and legally unequal, me-first, litigious, grasping capitalist society, full of selfish people so ignorant that they can’t be trusted with the freedom to make their own decisions, conduct their lives, or even form their own opinions without careful supervision.  I believe this to be a deeply negative portrayal of a society that I daresay is no worse than most societies in human history, but certainly no better either, made up of people individually no better or worse than any selection of humans from any other place or time.

However, do we really want our children, or indeed our adults, to have a ‘realistic’ view of society, or to match or fit with its norms?  I am not arguing for simplistic naivety or a willing blindness to the many faults of both society and individuals, but rather in favour of what Someone once said when He told people that they ought to be ‘in the world, but not of the world’.

I have stated before that I am an idealist when it comes to human nature; I believe that people are fundamentally good, even if that good is sometimes deeply hidden, sometimes a spark so faint, buried so deep in a mind and soul so utterly twisted and corroded as to be all but invisible.  That doesn’t change the fact that people are frequently deeply selfish, wilfully ignorant and generally lacking in even the processed cheese spread of human kindness, never mind the milk.  You of course, dear reader, are clearly an exception to this, since you have shown the singular wisdom, mental clarity, and magnitude of spirit to not only be viewing this blog, but to have stuck with this post for so long already.

We should not be blind to the way society is, and we certainly shouldn’t ignore its faults, or pretend that they don’t exist.  They must be acknowledged and confronted; not necessarily in an antagonistic way, but with a view to fixing them, or at least of demonstrating that a ‘more perfect way’ (I apologise for the grammatical inaccuracy, but you must blame Mr. Wesley) is possible, with all the benefits that come with it.

Greed, ignorance, bigotry, selfishness, hatred; are these the ‘norms’ to which we wish to conform?  I have seen it suggested in the past that the church ought to change to adapt itself to society in order to ‘serve it better’.  However, if we as Christians claim to believe in eternal truths, then that is the exact opposite of what we ought to be doing.  To quote Chesterton (again), “Right is Right even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong even if everybody is wrong about it.”  We may well disagree on exactly what those eternal truths are, citing historical contexts, nuances of interpretation and simple human error for our differences of opinion, but having decided, as organisations and as individuals, we must stick to them, no matter what ‘society’ tell us.

If that leaves us with a view of society that is not realistic, it is only because we think that society ought to be other than it is.  If we do not fit or match the norms of society, then to my mind it simply means that we are getting things right.  Are we grossly unprepared for society?  I would say that society is grossly unprepared for us.

The Inadvertent Easter Chorus

It is a tradition so entrenched in British Protestant Christianity (and Catholicism, for all I know) that it is practically law, that the last hymn to be sung on Easter Sunday is ‘Thine be the Glory’.  There are good reasons for this.  It is a hymn to rock out to, full of vim and vigour, and as long as you have a half-decent organist, it’s one that you can really belt out with all the enthusiasm that you can muster.  It is full of the triumph and victory of Easter, of the surprise twist in the story that everyone already knows, of snatching eternal victory from the jaws of infinite defeat, God’s sudden subversion of His own rules.  It’s a great hymn.

It is perhaps a trifle predictable, and possibly once you have lived a long life, you do not look forward to it.  “Oh no,” you may think as you scan the order of service.  “Thine be the Glory, again?  Ugh!”

I am afraid that I am not yet sufficiently jaded or advanced in years to feel this way.  I do not anticipate ever feeling this way, although one must never say never.

I’ve written before about God’s apparent tone-deafness and colour blindness.  It is impossible for a human being to ever even imagine how things appear from God’s infinite and timeless point of view, but I would love to sit up on the International Space Station on Easter Sunday, with a set of laser-microphones carefully aimed at every church in the UK and plugged into a single set of speakers.  At about 11.20am, I would turn them all on at once.

At about 11.25, or a little before, the first church would begin to sing.

Thine be the glory, risen conquering Son!

Over the next three or four minutes, more and more congregations would begin to join in as they arrive at the closing hymn.  The chorus would swell, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of Christians, all singing the same hymn, the same tune, all raising their voices heavenward.  It reaches a crescendo, a song sung in the round with hundreds of parts, a cacophony of voices going at slightly different speeds, in slightly different keys, until individual words can barely be made out, and it is just a roar.  A deaf choir without a conductor, without training, with nothing but enthusiasm for the song.

The first ones have already finished, the majority are almost done.  The stragglers, the churches where the sermon went on a bit long, the large congregations who took a bit longer to take communion are beginning.  More and more voice fall silent and the final blessings are spoken.  The lyrics can now be made out again.

At perhaps 11.45 or 11.50, the last congregation reaches the end.

Endless is the victory, thou o’er death hast won!

And the best part is that to my knowledge, there is no prior arrangement to this.  No clandestine synod sat down and agreed that Easter Sunday services must end with Thine be the Glory.  Indeed, a few maverick congregations, a few clergy who want to do ‘something different’ won’t be joining in.  They’ll have some hymn, no doubt equally good in terms of content and tune, but they will still have missed out.  The ones whose services start early or late will probably have had it, but they will have missed the synchronised singing.

This doesn’t happen at Christmas.  Often the Christmas service will end with ‘O Come all ye Faithful’, but the uniformity is not even close to that of Easter and the national chorus of ‘Thine be the Glory’.

Though we are many, we are one body, because we all share in the one bread.  And once a year, without even really realising that we are doing it, we all sing the same song.