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I woke up on Milarrochy Bay campsite on the shores of Loch Lomond on Sunday morning to a grand symphony of songbirds competing for the platform. It was one of these occasions were nature reveals to us that the whole is greater than the number of the parts.
The evening before, the rich sundown on the Loch captured me. It is a place of tranquil beauty that engenders one to look at the bigger questions in life. My thoughts took me to the statement by the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy who wrote,
In the name of God, stop and cease work and look around you.
I feel frustration in Tolstoy’s words. Don’t you? I empathise with his disappointment also. I recall an evening back in the sixties when I was a child when I first looked around me.
I suppose it must have been the late summer. I had been spending the month on the idyllic Island of Bute on Scotland’s west coast. We had a cabin with no running water or electricity. My job was to go and fill up the water containers from the communal well. Cows would cautiously approach and stare curiously whilst the smaller ones would shuffle through for front-row viewing.
At dusk, we would light paraffin lamps to illuminate the nights. My father would read children’s books. We were all ears as he read Heidi, Tales From 1001 Nights and Chinese Folk Tales. We ate freshly made pancakes washed down with jam and small glasses of sweet stout.
The lamp caused a sibilant sound as it burned up kerosene. It flickered and fostered sleepiness. It finally slumbered for the evening, and we would retire.
I lay there in my bed watching the stars cascading through the window; every one of them. And I wondered if the Chinese farmer boys, or the Bedouin shepherd boys or the milk maids in the Swiss mountains were seeing and feeling the sense of awe that I felt in my heart as the universe entered in. Years later, I read the following,
"When I behold Your heavens,
The work of Your fingers,
The moon and the stars,
Which You have set in place –
What is man that You are mindful of him,
On the son of man that You take care of him."
Psalm 8: 3-6 (BSB).
Tolstoy was a believer. What would he think of humans today who deny the existence of God. It is a pity; man cuts down the tree to get to the fruit. We benefit from this incredible planet, and yet, we do not acknowledge its creator.
Do you think science has produced answers? Think about it, we do not know how the universe came to be. We do not know how inorganic produces organic. We are creatures governed by a morality that cannot be explained other than from an outside source. Why is the universe a mathematically precise? What is consciousness? The list goas on. Personally, I have found those answers in the Bible.