I want to speak theologically, to say what I think about God and angels. But then, it’s a bit hard putting abstractions into words. No, that’s completely wrong. It is all too easy to put abstractions into words, and give them an imaginary reality. So I’m rather glad to find myself talking about bees and wasps, for they exist. I have known them for myself and as knowledge gathered up in words by other people.
Following on from my last (Wasp Honey) I’m still astonished to learn that a wasp feeds its babies live insects (after stinging them) or as I once witnessed, a morsel of ham from a sandwich I was eating in a pub garden. The adult wasp is a sugar-junkie, sucking the sweet saliva from its own babies when it can, otherwise whatever sugar it can get from the world outside the nest: over-ripe apples, Coca-Cola, it’s not fussy.
The wasp may not be a good role-model for a human mother, but it gets by. Through such facts and daily observations direct from nature, I get to understand life in a quite different way. As I explained in my last, I can’t share with you the angelic miracles I witness in people’s lives: all my stories of magic and redemption are too intimate to relate. But Nature is everywhere you look, even in our commercial world.
This morning I was in a “retail park”, one of those places where some distant boardroom once decreed the investment of capital, which it now tightly manages from afar by applying some proven formula. One of the lots was occupied by Pizza Hut, in a very peculiar-shaped building, designed to look like an oversized shack, casually built. Ugly but a design tried and tested not to deter customers. Big successful companies don’t make that kind of mistake. They are the fittest, ergo they survive. It’s tempting to say we are the slaves of big business, and that things I don’t much like—Hollywood movies and fancy mobile phones, say—are foisted upon an undiscriminating public. Not at all. Producers and consumers, both needy, attract one another by flirting, before falling helplessly in love. It’s a happy marriage because the adaptation works both ways. It’s symbiosis, as with the bee and the flower. Without the flower, no bee, for it lives on nectar. Without the bee, no flower, for it depends on pollination.
Which brings me at last to my desired destination, theology. I woke in the night of 25th December, and grabbed a notebook in the dark to scribble my sudden thoughts about God. I saw in a flash that my lifetime’s puzzlement was over: there’s not a single mighty boss at all. The question “Do you believe in God?” oughtn’t to be asked. It implies there are but two choices. Either there is one Almighty, who’s omniscient and omnipresent; or else all is chaos and blind evolution. Neither stands up to the reality in which we live and move, and have our being.
I saw that the world is not one big monopoly, not even a kind of retail park controlled from head offices far away. More likely aided by a host of freelance angels. They’re not employees subservient to a divine master-plan, any more than wasps, privateer cousins of the virtuous bee, are managed by their Queen.
In the still of Christmas night, I thought for a scary moment I might have a Vocation, to take down a scripture, “the gospel of All Angels” exposing these beings as a “wild orgasm of anarchists”*. Only when I had transcribed them would I sleep easy in my bed, only when I believed “myself to have found, on all essential points, the final solution of the problems”†—of God, the Universe and Everything.
It was a relief when Dawn finally arrived, and I knew I know nothing.
* Attributed to President Nixon, who
referred to the anti-war movement as a “wild orgasm of anarchists sweeping across the country like a prairie fire.”
† from Wittgenstein’s preface to his Tractatus, 1918.