Christian Comment with Rev’d Penny West, Retired Priest with PTO (Bishop’s Permission to Officiate) West of Severn Benefice

Revelation from creation

I LIVE in a hamlet and am surrounded by the natural world.

As I'm writing the rain is hammering on the conservatory roof, this sound always brings pleasure to me because I am safe and dry inside but today it brings relief and pleasure.

Why?

You may ask, does the writer express relief and pleasure because it is raining.

The answer lies the lack of rain this year.

The farmers who live and work around here have been desperate for some rain.

Earlier on in the year the grass wasn’t growing sufficiently for hay making because it was so dry, then it rained becoming hot and dry again leading to some lovely hay being made.

However, there has been little rain since then until today, which means that the grass hasn’t grown since that first cut.

In a reasonable season farmers plan second and sometimes third cut of hay and silage.

You may be thinking that this is reading more like Farmers Weekly than Christian Comment.

I can appreciate this but I am passionate that we are dependent on God for creation and all it gives to us.

This gift is freely given by the Creator.

We didn’t have to ask for it, we almost certainly don’t deserve it because we are supposed to care for it.

Instead of this we abuse this gift of life which ramifies through everything which lives and breathes and has its being.

The word grace, in the religious sense, is gift, a gift which has been feely given by our creator God but we are expected to care for it, respect and protect it.

Creation is an inspiration, or should be, for as we really study it we begin to realise that every thing that has life, be it animal, bird, reptile, fish, insect, plant, trees, clouds weather, space etc etc, is an expression of the energy, power, force, life which we, semantically, label as God.

Other religions call this force by other names according to their culture and word view.

Creation reveals to us the presence and actions of a Creator, who is brilliantly called the Compassionate Consciousness in Don Macgregor’s book Blue Sky God.