Pretty much every day I sneak out of my house and walk around the yard. The garden left here by the past owners has given me a lot of joy. So if it isn’t raining and you can’t find me inside, it’s fairly certain where I am.
I’ve taken to talking to bugs of all sorts that I find searching out nectar among the ornamental onions and lavender. I check to see if there are any lettuce or zinnia seeds to gather, and if there are any raspberries to pluck. Close to my beehives I smell the smell of church candles and watching the bees in their flurry to gather enough pollen for the babies who will be over-wintering. I get a sense of calm and of God.
It surprises me that a person can love nature and not believe in God at the same time. His fingerprint is everywhere.
My son’s catechism lessons this past week were about how a man can come to know God in two ways. The first is divine revelation (the Scriptures, tradition, prophecy), which not everyone has the opportunity to experience. But natural reason is the second way. There is enough evidence in the petals of a flower to prove the existence of God, and if man has trained his mind to seek and find reason, he can find God in a thoughtful backyard walk.
The Catholic Church, specifically, is a Church of natural reason. We are traditionally and historically filled with the wonders of logic, truth, beauty, and goodness. We are led to God through the majestic writings of saints and mystics, but also through the stars of the sky and the wheat of the fields. There is a sense of order and purpose in the natural world.
I saw a vestment once, on display, that was decorated with the image of a pelican, piercing its own flesh to feed its children. The belief is that, when food is scarce, the mother bird gives her own blood to her starving chicks. I had never known before that this is a common eucharistic symbol.
It made me think of a true story I once read, shared by an evangelical writer. A man and his son were trapped in an avalanche. They lay there, pinned to the ground and smothering for days. The boy whispered out to his father that he was thirsty. The father, who could just reach out and touch his son, bit into his own finger and put it into his son’s mouth. The blood actually saved his son’s life.
The eucharistic meaning was so clear, so naturally reasonable. A man who loves his son will offer his own blood to save him. But the writer insisted that while this man gave his son true blood, Christ did so only symbolically at the Last Supper. I wasn’t sure why the writer bothered to tell the story if he truly believed it was beautiful for a mere mortal to save his son this way, infusing his own life into him, but abhorrent for Our Lord to do the same. The man gave his blood, but Jesus, it seems, could only give bread. The writer was so close to the truth!
The pelican and the father teach us who God is by both divine revelation and natural reason, I suppose. They are both a word sent to us, a kind of prophecy of who God is: life-giver, saviour, selfless love, pierced and bleeding, True Food, and True Drink. They are also a puzzle to logically piece together.
If there is no God, then there is no purpose, no reason to exist or to love. There is only instinct and survival. But the bird plucks her chest, the man pierces his finger, the flower dies into seed, and the bees gather pollen, all to give life to another. They have something imprinted in their being, something that drives them to do this, at the cost of their own blood. This is a clue to all reasoning humans that God is alive and that he does the same.
The bird, the man, the world around us not only tell us that a god exists. They tell those with eyes to see and ears to hear what kind of a God he is: beautiful and selfless, one who longs to feed and infuse us with his own precious blood. Divine revelation and natural reason can lead all who seek to the startling beauty of God’s love.