Social Affairs

Thinking Anew – ‘How wonderful the works of your hands’

“Jesus himself constantly used the natural world to reveal more of God: the sheep who know their shepherd, the birds of the air, the lilies of the field.” Photograph: iStock

Wendy May Jacobs
Sat Sep 28 2019 - 00:01

When I was pregnant with my first child, our friend Mark told us how his own children had revealed to him something fresh and vital about the heart of God. He felt most close to God, he shared, when he was watching his children happily engrossed in playing, unaware that he was there.

This year I got my first ever dog, closely followed by a second. They are both rescue dogs and they came to us from Transylvania, complete with passports and anti-rabies vaccinations. They remind us what life is all about, and they help us to understand each day how dear we are to our creator.

Zara, our first dog, is luminous with beauty and elegance. She has golden, kohl-rimmed eyes, like an elfin hound, pearly blonde fur, a brown back. Whenever I am out walking with her, passers-by stop to admire her unusual beauty and colouring. From every angle she gladdens the eye. When she sits she looks like a lion, other times she settles herself like the Sphinx. Part husky, part greyhound (or so we are told), her nature is loving and reserved. Each month I take her visiting with me to a psychiatric hospital and for some residents her stillness and gentleness are a healing boon. Zara accepts what she is offered with dignity and poise.

Archie came to us five months later, a friend of Zara’s from Romania. Unlike Zara, he is not a classy dog. He is smaller, older, with a missing front paw – caught in a rat trap and amputated. When he arrived he wore a red plastic collar studded with diamonds, like a drug-dealer dog. He sleeps on his back with absolute abandon, legs akimbo, head at a strange angle. Whereas Zara is almost completely silent (she scarcely even barks), Archie puffs and pants and sneezes and wheezes, barking at squirrels and bicycles. You can always hear him coming. He hobbles through the door when I am at my desk and sits beside me, looking up. He really really loves me – I’m not going to lie! He gazes at me and I take his small head in my hands and gaze back into his brave, optimistic, unblinking brown eyes. You are safe with us, I tell him, I tell them both, for the rest of your lives.

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Ah how these dogs are just themselves! – guilelessly living according to their natures, accepting the miraculous adventure of their lives without fuss, finding pleasure in the simplest of things: a walk, a dog biscuit, a cuddle. Somehow they have found their way to our home . . . and how we love them both, in their utter distinctiveness, with their funny ways! Isn’t that how God loves us? Isn’t that how we should love each other? Isn’t that how we should love and accept ourselves?

In Sunday’s gospel reading, Jesus says something breath-takingly honouring to Nathanael. “Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!” Those were surely words for Nathanael to treasure for the rest of his days. Yet in the created world it is only humans who find themselves living in any other way.

Something which shone from Jesus himself was his integrity, his lack of deceit, his utter security in the love of his heavenly father. He was born one of us to reveal the infinite depth of this love for the whole of creation. Jesus himself constantly used the natural world to reveal more of God: the sheep who know their shepherd, the birds of the air, the lilies of the field. The wonder of the “is-ness” of all things: the random rustle of the leaves on the trees, each whiskered rat living in the sewers, each worm burying themself in our compost heaps, each wasp that helps the bees pollinate, each pigeon which mates for life. How wonderful the works of your hands, O God! Deepen our respect for our beautiful, broken world. The Kingdom of God is not a competition. Remind us to be ourselves, and that being ourselves, fearfully and wonderfully made, is enough.

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