God in a box?

You know, if I’d made a flower, it would be simple. Like a Michaelmas daisy. Simple petals. Bright stamens. Delicate colours of lilac and lemon contrasting with the bottle green leaves.

But I didn’t and cannot make a flower. I can draw some, photo others. Marvel at their loveliness. But I can’t make one palisade cell. They astound me.

William Blake has a series of poems called ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience’. Here I find poems including one about a lamb and also one about a tiger. You may know the famous lines of the latter:

Tyger, Tyger, burning bright,

In the forests of the night:

What immortal hand or eye,

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

William Blake, ‘The Tiger’ from Songs of Experience 1789 – 94

When I read it as an undergrad it struck me: ‘What does the creature (the tiger) tell us about the Creator?’ In fact Blake goes on to say:

Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Sometimes we think we have the sum of God. He’s like this. He does that. He’ll do this. We can’t figure out other people, our friends, family, spouse, but we think we have the measure of God!

No we don’t! That’s what Blake was trying to tell us. God makes gentle lambs and fiery tigers. He’s awesome. He’s gentle. He made us. Loves us. But we am so far from working Him out. How can a finite creature do that to an infinite Creator?

Each year the late summer display of climbing Passion Flowers in my garden remind me of Blake’s Tyger. Same flowering time as Michaelmas daisies. Similar lilacs and yellows. But wow, what a zany mix of the spectacular, bizzare and striking. A starfish of a flower, reaching out its arms to heaven, displaying a tiered extravaganza of petals and sepals. A face surrounded by an exotic lilac and mauve lion’s mane. And all this in one flower.

The Michaelmas Daisy and the Passion Flower live near each other in my garden. Both are marvellous creations, in their simplicity and complexity. Like Blake’s lamb and tiger, they remind me that their, and my, Creator is immeasurable more than I can fathom, and yet He calls me friend. I’d best not put Him in a box. Better to stand back and wonder. He is magnificent.