Common Ground Song 44 ‘God’s will for Creation’
Words: John Bell (translated from Gaelic) © Panel on Worship. Music: traditional Gaelic
Featured image: the old avenue at Scargill. © estate of Linda Craven
Another creation-related song for the season, this time in the Scots Gaelic tradition. Again, I could not find a performance online that included the words either written or sung. But each of the four verses mentions some aspect of the natural world, along with a brief reference to ‘each star in the sky’. Funny, isn’t it, how we think about life on Earth in great detail, and dismiss the other 99.999% (recurring) of the Universe in one line! Maybe other creatures in another galaxy are at this moment thanking God for the life on their planet, giving barely a thought to whether we might exist. I wrote a poem about that once, which I will upload here some time. But back to this text…
Verse 1 starts with ‘God’s will for creation is Jesus’ to do’. In Christian theology, God the Father/Creator is the prime mover, the ‘ground of all being’, but Jesus is his Son, or his ‘living Word’, the actor through whom all things are being created (creation is better thought of a constant process, rather than a once-for-all act long ago). There is, surprisingly, no mention of the Holy Spirit in these verses. John Bell’s Christian theology is firmly Trinitarian, and the Spirit is usually credited with being God eternally present in every part of creation.
Each aspect of creation, then, is ‘filled with God’s blessing, stirred by God’s hand’ (verse 2). Each is ‘summoned by God to be’ (verse 3). The chorus to each verse is ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus! How can we help but praise him?’ I would prefer this to be sung as ‘How can we help but praise you’, as hymns should preferably be sung to our Lord, rather than about him.
Finally, coming back to verse 1, there is one line that brought me up short: ‘new branches to wither, old trees to renew’. Life, creation, is not only about adding new lives and more living tissue to a world already bursting with life. The old has to decay and die, in order to make way for the new. That is the way of the world. But in verse 4, the hymn declares that each created being ‘proclaims the Lord’s goodness, which never can die’. The physical dies, but the spirit, in God’s goodness, lives on.
The featured photo was taken by my late wife Linda in 2010, of the old avenue of chestnut trees at Scargill House, planted probably in the early 20th century. A few of them had already died, and a couple of years after this photo, the rest were felled as they had reached the end of their life, and they were replaced by younger lime trees. Fourteen years on, those new trees are already forming another glorious, welcoming sight to visitors.
As we say farewell to Linda at her funeral tomorrow, we remember that every second, three humans are born and a slightly smaller number pass on from this world. Not counting all the other animals, plants, and whatever life God is creating on other worlds. Death is part of life, what has blossomed and flourished must eventually wither. Hard as it is to accept that in the context of one loving relationship, one soul must move on to make way for another. May those who are born today, or tomorrow (including Linda’s cousin’s grandson, whose birth is expected imminently), live on to praise God’s goodness.