Water in Excelsis
By Robert Capon, from “The Supper of the Lamb”
To raise a glass, however, is to raise a question. One honest look at any real thing – one minute’s contemplation of any process on earth – leads straight into the conundrum of the relationship of God to the world. The solution is hardly obvious. For something that could not be at all without God, creation seems to do rather well without him. Only miracles are simple; nature is a mystery. Autumn by autumn, He makes wine upon a thousand hills, but He does it without tipping His hand. Glucose, fructose, and Saccharomyces ellipsoideus apparently manage very well on their own. So much so, that the resolving of the conflict between the sacred and the secular (or, better said, the repairing of the damage done by divorcing them) has been billed as the major problem of modern theology. Permit me, therefore, glass in hand and cooking Sherry within easy reach, the world’s most interrupted discourse on the subject. In vino veritas.
Take the largest part of that truth first. God makes wine. For all its difficulties, there is no way around the doctrine of creation. But notice the tense: He makes; not made. He did not create once upon a time, only to find himself saddled now with the unavoidable and embarrassing result of that first rash decision. That is only to welsh on the idea of an unnecessary world, to make creation a self-perpetuating pool game which is contingent only at the start – which needs only the first push on the cue ball to keep it going forever. It will not do. The world is more unnecessary than that. It is unnecessary now; it cries in this moment for a cause to hold it in being. It was St. Thomas, I think, who pointed out long ago that if God wanted to get rid of the universe, He would not have to do anything; He would have to stop doing something. Wine is – the fruit of the vine stands in act, outside of nothing – because it is His very present pleasure to have it so. The creative act is contemporary, intimate, and immediate to each part, parcel and period of the world.
Do you see that that means? In a general way we concede that God made the world out of joy. He didn’t need it; He just thought it was a good thing. But if you confine His activity in creation to the beginning only, you lose most of the joy in the subsequent shuffle of history. Sure it was good back then, you say, but since then, we’ve been eating leftovers. How much better a world it becomes when you see Him creating at all times and at every time; when you see that in preserving of the old in being is just as much creation as the bringing of the new out of nothing. Each thing, at every moment, becomes the delight of His hand, the apple of His eye. The bloom of yeast lies upon the grape skins year after year because He likes it; C6H12O6=2C2H5OH+2CO2 is a dependable process because, every September, He says, that was nice; let’s do it again.
Let us pause and drink to that.
To a radically, perpetually unnecessary world; to the restoration of astonishment to the heart and mystery to the mind; to wine, because it is a gift we never expected; to mushroom and artichoke, for they are incredible legacies; to improbable acids and high alcohols, since we would hardly have thought of them ourselves; and to all being, because it is superfluous: to the hairs on Harry’s ear, and to the seven hundred and sixty-eighth cell from the upper attachment of the right gluteus maximum in the last girl on the chorus line. Prosit, Dear Hearts. Cheers, Men and Brethren. We are free: nothing is needful, everything is for joy. Let the bookkeepers struggle with their balance sheets; it is the tippler who sees the untipped Hand. God is eccentric; He has loves; not reasons. Salute!
But there is more. He creates in a mystery. What he holds intimately and contemporaneously in being, acts, nonetheless, for itself. The secular is not the sacred. Creation exists in its own right, in no parable, no front, no Punch and Judy show in which God plays all the parts, but a vast and raucous meeting where each thing acts out its nature, shouts I am I, as if no other thing had being. The world exists, not for what it means but for what it is. The purpose of mushrooms is to be mushrooms; wine is in order to be wine. Things are precious before they are contributory. It is a false piety that walks through creation looking only for lessons which can be applied somewhere else. To be sure, God remains the greatest good, but, for all that, the world is still good in itself. Indeed, since He does not need it, its whole reason for being must lie in its own goodness; He has not use for it; only delight.
Just think what that means. We were not made in God’s image for nothing. The child’s preference of sweets over spinach, mankind’s universal love of the toothsome rather than the nutritious is the mark of our greatness, the proof that we love the secular as He does – for its secularity. We have eyes which see what He sees, lips which praise what He praises, and mouths which relish things, because He first pronounced them good. The world is no disposable ladder to heaven. Earth is not convenient, it is good; it is, by God’s design, our lawful love.
Romans 1:20 . . . For ever since the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky. Through everything God made, they can clearly see his invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature.
1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 . . . Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.