It's only natural (but it still sucks)

Death of a duckling | Rage against who? | Nature, good and bad

What does the death of a duckling have to say about the nature of the universe and God?

Death of a duckling

I even chose my secondary school partly on the basis of a brood of ducklings

I've always been tremendously fond of ducklings (I don't mean crispy fried). I even unwisely chose my secondary school partly on the basis that there was a brood of ducklings in the quad pond when I went for the open evening. And this year my 4-year-old son has been asking for daily report-backs on how many ducklings I've seen in Greenwich Park. For the past week I'd sadly had to report dwindling numbers - 9 down to 5, down to 4, down to 2... but then on Tuesday lunchtime to my delighted amazement I came upon 17 ducklings in the main wildfowl lake. I happily watched the antics of the little swimming fluff-balls for some time and was about to turn away when I noticed a Canada Goose treading on a duckling that was sitting on the concrete sloping down into the water. The goose then picked up the duckling in its beak, shook it and dropped it. It lay still.

Angry and upset, I stood wondering whether I should transgress the park boundaries, step over the fence and pick up the duckling, although I was sure that it was already dead. Then a crow flew down and snatched up the little body in its beak, but a mother duck flew at it and it dropped the dead duckling into the water where it floated with its head underwater. The saddest sight for me was the mother duck swimming up behind it and repeatedly nudging the little floating body with her beak as though she could coax it back to life. At the risk of being written off as pathetically sentimental, it brought tears to my eyes and an intense feeling of loss and grief.

Rage against - who?

suddenly that dead duckling represented all the injustice of the world

I know it's all perfectly natural and normal, and that only a few ducklings - and other young animals - survive to adolescence, let alone adulthood. But suddenly that small bedraggled floating bundle of dead duckling became for me the representative of all the injustice and wrong and cruelty of the world, and my heart just wanted to shout out abuse and rage against whatever it was that made things be this way.

The obvious thought is that it's God who made things this way, and against him that my anger should be directed. But I can't shake the feeling that the God I've seen in Jesus Christ was grieving every bit as much for that duckling as I was. In some ways the duckling was like Christ - the very symbol of innocent suffering at the hands of the cruelty and injustice in the universe. I felt that my anger must be directed at all the evil in the world, and at the corresponding evil in myself.

Nature, good and bad

Is the universe fundamentally benevolent or hostile?

Nature is so full of beauty and loveliness, and simultaneously so full of suffering and death. Is the one necessary for the other, or are death and cruelty alien and unnatural evils that have found their way into a good creation?

What about lust, greed, anger and violence - these things feel entirely natural; are they just natural in-built parts of our evolved survival package, or are they a corruption of good instincts and impulses?

Is the universe fundamentally benevolent or hostile, kind or cruel? Is it more truly natural to be compassionate and caring or to compete and kill?

I have no easy answers to these questions. All I know is that I have chosen to base my life on the reality and goodness of God, to believe in the beauty and grace despite the very real pain and injustice. This present world, this nature, is good but it is not perfect, is not how it is ultimately meant to be. Perhaps the pain is part of the process of becoming perfect - or perhaps it is an evil to be fought and overcome.

Related posts:

• Evolution, fall and morality
• Earthquakes and God - why does God allow natural disasters?

Reality as Sacrament and Icon

No, I'm not turning Catholic or Orthodox (though I see much good in both). Rather I've recently been discovering a new (actually probably very old) set of ways of understanding and relating to God and the world - or rather to God in and through the world. These ways are best described in words like sacrament, icon, transcendent immanence, transluminence and super/naturalism. I'd sum it up as the idea of God as the Reality behind reality.

I'm tentatively starting to see each new moment, sight, experience and encounter - the whole world and all of life - as potentially sacramental. Each new sight, meeting or creature can become a sacrament, a physical vessel or conduit of the divine presence, mediating God's reality to us. So in and through the things of the natural world we can potentially encounter God, receive his love and grace, hear his inaudible voice.

Related to this is the idea of the world and all in it - all of physical reality - as icon. An icon is not an idol, an object of worship, but rather a channel of worship, a window through which we glimpse a little of the God whom no image can capture or truly represent (Christ alone is the perfect icon).

Anything can be an idol if put in place of God; almost anything (with the exception of that which is inherently evil) can be an icon or sacrament. Each place can become a sacred space; each moment can be a holy moment, every mundane activity can be worship. God is not contained in his creation, but (for those with eyes to see) he saturates it, pervades it, shines through it so that truly 'Earth's crammed with heaven / And every common bush aflame with God'. I'm calling this shining-through transluminence.

Closely linked to this is the idea of the extraordinary in the ordinary - the miraculous in the mundane, the eternal in the everyday. Sometimes you may see a familiar face or some perfectly ordinary thing but you see it afresh, as though for the first time. These epiphanies again reveal the ordinary stuff of life as sacraments and icons through which we glimpse the divine.

Transcendent immanence is the idea that God is at the same time both totally transcendent (beyond, above, over, outside, greater than) and also totally immanent (present, near, within, through, beneath). The Trinity is a potent symbol of this - God's Spirit makes the transcendent, timeless God present within/through each part and particle of created time and space, and perhaps the Son is the floodgate through which the Spirit enters the cosmos, the bridge-maker between the eternal and temporal realms. (NB when I say the Trinity is a symbol I don't mean that it isn't real.)

Alongside all these ideas is what I'm calling super/naturalism, aka supernatural theism. This sees the realms or dimensions of natural and supernatural, physical and spiritual, visible and invisible as integrated, intersecting at all points - not separate but part of a seamless unity. There is therefore no division between 'sacred' and 'profane' or physical and spiritual - each touches on the other and is a part of the other, just as body and soul co-inhere (if that's a word). This allows us to see God as intimately involved in the physical world, acting in it through natural events and circumstances.

We therefore don't need to make a distinction between miraculous 'God' events and normal, natural events that somehow operate apart from or without God. By the same token, a 'natural' or scientific account of some phenomenon need not deny or exclude God's presence or activity within and through it. We do not need, for example, to choose between Creation and Evolution - we can affirm the both/and as we can affirm that each baby is 'created' by God yet at the same time formed through normal, natural everyday biological processes. So belief in the supernatural is not 'gilding the lily' as some atheists suggest - it is merely seeing the lily in the fullness of its (sacramental) reality.

This does not of course mean that everything in nature is equally or fully good, God-filled or God-ordained. God's world is infected throughout and in every part with evil and corruption (see previous post on God and evil). Almost no object or experience is a pure sacrament or perfect icon; as yet we only ever glimpse God 'as through a glass darkly' (and writing this through a heavy cold on a grey January day, the glass does seems pretty dark). But the glimpses are genuine, and it is from the matter and spirit of this corrupted but originally good world that God is here and now invisibly building his new, redeemed and restored creation - his kingdom, in which his love will reign fully and his face be seen perfectly.

Finally, if all of reality is in some way sacramental, then I am - you are - as well. We each dimly, stumblingly, often unwittingly yet uniquely reflect and transmit glimpses of God to others.