In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
John 1:1-5 (NIVUK)
Like many words in common use, we use ‘creation’ as if we all meant the same thing in its use. We don’t.
If you have never stood in thought looking at the statue of Newton outside the British Library, you should. It is based upon William Blake’s image of Newton exploring.
Blake went to his death in the presence of his collaborator and wife Catherine with whom he closely worked. He wrote that she was his full partner in both life and work. He died whilst drawing her saying that he would be with her forever. There were witnesses who reported that he said that he was just going to The Country made accessible by Jesus Christ the Saviour. His countenance became fair and he sang of things that he saw in Heaven. Some years later, when she herself was dying, Catherine calmly called out to Blake that she would soon be with him, reportedly as if he were in the next room.
You may interpret this as the delusions of insanity. Some have. I don’t because I have been enabled to understand Creation more clearly because of their life and works. They died in poverty having refused to compromise with the ordinary and they found the real.
Blake’s engravings that appear in Pilgrims’ Progress caught me when I was a child. The illustrated allegory seems to me to be about right. This life is a pilgrimage not from one thing to another, but a process by which we recover God.
The gospel attributed to John in its first verses says that the Word allowed all things to be made.
That tells me that Creation is everything and that Jesus is in everything.
It is a commonplace to treat the material world differently from the spiritual. Interpretations of what counts as science have produced a splitting of the senses from the real. If you can’t touch it, it is claimed, it is not knowable. Newton did not find that to be true because it is merely one interpretation of ‘science’. The Blakes certainly would not accept that, they saw the spiritual at the same time as the material. Bunyan’s visions rigorously deny it too.
There have been many people who see that knowledge is not about ‘either/or’ but about ‘all’. Not all of them are commonly accepted as being acceptable to mainstream churches. Hey ho.
If, as all this suggests, we might be well advised to persuade ourselves to seek God in everything, then we too could anticipate looking forward to our dying as merely a doorway. Not perhaps so much ‘I know where I’m going’ as ‘I am now where I AM’.
So, what does ‘creation’ mean for you? Me, I am with Newton, creation is what Christ gives us in which to find God. It’s a pilgrimage.
John Cartwright
Image: Loco Steve from Bromley, UK - Statue of Newton (after Paolozzi) in the British Library courtyard (London).
CC BY-SA 2.0
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