Arundhati Roy and G.K. Chesterton
Sacred Chain Guides
When thinking about God as creator, it’s better to consider the metaphor of an artist or even a child than an engineer.
In my previous Sacred Chain teaser post, I wrote about Part II of the book: the Challenge of Time. There we saw how little of the history of the universe has included our species, Homo sapiens. What does that tell us about God’s priorities and our place in creation? Why would God spend billions of years doing nothing but creating heavier elements in stars by smashing together hydrogen atoms over and over again? It doesn’t seem like God’s process of creation was very concerned about time and efficiency.
If you’re an omnipotent being, why not just speak all the heavy elements into being? That leads me in the book to consider what miracles are. I don’t think they are simply labor-saving devices. If I had miraculous powers, I’d have all the leaves fall into neat piles so I didn’t have to rake them. I don’t particularly like raking, and I’d happily skip to the end goal. But I wouldn’t use miracles to skip to the end of a game so we’d know who the winner is without having to go through the game; the game is fun and least part of the reason we play games, not just to see who wins.
Like I do for each of the challenges in the book, I look for a guide to help me sort out what to think about things. For this one I found two.
Arundhati Roy is an Indian novelist and public intellectual. I hadn’t heard of her before a trip to India’s southern state of India. But it turns out she’s a pretty big deal. Her novel The God of Small Things won the Booker Prize in 1997 (the best novel written in English). I’ve read it a couple of times now. I think Roy might find it surprising that it helped me find deeper faith, because I don’t know that she herself is a person of faith. But her novel was inspirational to me in a couple of ways. I can only give you one of them here without running afoul of the word limits for quoting from the book that publishers have imposed on me, and it can be seen in the title of the book itself: God delights in the small things.
Visiting India is often described as an assault on the senses — the colors, the sounds, the smells, the tastes all seem enhanced. Roy describes these masterfully. But it is not just to add color to the story. These are the important things. She says (as the narrator), “Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story.”
I can’t read that line and not think of the hydrogen atoms in a star, “smashed and reconstituted” into helium atoms and eventually the rest of the elements. These become of the bones of the story of life in our universe, of our story. Perhaps we shouldn’t focus just on the ultimate meaning or purpose, which from our perspective seems to emerge from these small and insignificant parts. Maybe it’s not the devil who is in the details, but looking with more focused eyes we might see the God of small things.
Furthermore, maybe like playing a game, God enjoys the process of creating and not just the end product. G.K. Chesterton was a British writer in the first few decades of the twentieth century. He wrote fiction and essays, as well as popular books defending the reasonableness of Christianity. One of these latter books, published in 1908 but still widely read today, is titled Orthodoxy. In it he attempted to explain how he came to believe in Christianity.
In one section he reflects on the tendency of scientific explanation to push God out of natural processes. Too often, he thinks, when we discover a law of nature that shows why things happen over and over, we think it is due to impersonal causal forces. It was only back in our pre-scientific days, when we thought nature was impulsive and capricious, that we assigned gods to be the causes. In typical Chestertonian style, he flips this on its head. The passage is worth quoting at length:
Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical ENCORE.
Watching sunrises on billions of planets in the galaxy doesn’t get old for God. And perhaps God is watching closely enough to see inside those stars where elements are fusing into others: “Do it again, hydrogen! Make another helium atom, another oxygen atom! Then blow them out into space in a supernova, and let them collect again into other stars and planets. Then do it again!” Maybe that’s not boring or insignificant from God’s perspective, but amazing and endlessly fascinating to watch.
Sloan’s illustration for this chapter captures that feeling nicely:
There are other aspects of the long process of creation that be recast when we understand that God cares about other things besides us. If we’re the whole point of creation, then the hundreds of billions of galaxies and the 99.9% extinction rate of species on our planet seem wasteful. But if God likes all that other stuff too, then maybe we can see this kind of creation as lavish. These things couldn’t all exist at the same time in the same space. Creating with lots of time and space allows for many more things to exist, and the universe is richer for their existence.
I don’t think elevating other parts of God’s creation necessarily demotes us human beings to just another species. I think we have an important role to play — at least in our little corner of the universe (maybe there are other creatures that play that role in other star systems). I’ll consider the challenges that come along with that kind of thinking in future posts.