Day 64 - ‘Nature red in tooth and claw’

Being alive and being religious seem to be uncomfortable relationships. In order to be alive, something has to die for me, even if I don’t eat meat. My immune system is constantly killing invaders that want to consume me. At every level, life entails killing something.

The title here comes from Tennyson’s poem ‘In Memoriam’, written at the height of the Victorian Evangelical Revival when the emerging sciences were challenging the traditional church view that there is a steady state of creation. What God created is fixed and humanity is at its peak was an established view.

The observations from natural science questioned this, claiming instead that species transmute, usually called evolution. Perhaps ironically, parts of the church then and now don’t transmute and the popular notion that Christian faith began to fail as Darwinianism developed is strongly associated with this clash of ideas.

Tennyson included these lines in the poem -

Are God and Nature then at strife,

That Nature lends such evil dreams?

So careful of the type she seems,

So careless of the single life;

That I, considering everywhere

Her secret meaning in her deeds,

And finding that of fifty seeds

She often brings but one to bear,

I falter where I firmly trod,

And falling with my weight of cares

Upon the great world's altar-stairs

That slope thro' darkness up to God ...

The poet was distracted by the apparently random cruelty of creation, following the early death of a close friend. This led him to be a commentator upon the apparent conundrum that religion and science cannot be reconciled, Queen Victoria met him following the death of Albert to express her gratitude for the consolation that she found in the poem.

The dissenting churches in general, and the Congregational and Unitarian churches especially, however, were not so distressed at the seeming contradiction between religion and observation, after all, debating principles in order find practical solutions is at the very core of faith based upon people being mistaken and needing others of faith, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, to fathom out what to do. There were some intellectual giants in the nineteenth century who not only reconciled their observations with their faith, but came to understand that conflict and its constant processes of resolution are really part of God’s creation, not something apart.

In John16:13, Jesus teaches us that: “But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come.”

Faith differs from religion. Dogma freezes human ideas and makes people fear change and fail to search for God to find answers. Our Congregational forebears were all about honestly standing before God and saying “I don’t know – guide me”. Tradition and orthodoxy drive a wedge between ‘me’ and the guidance of the Spirit.

I hate to see creation suffering. I really don’t understand why things kill each other to survive and grow. However, they do. Maybe it illustrates that religion should be based on change too.

John Cartwright