18th June 2013

The man was clever alright. He started with a blob of glass on the end of a long pole. And by deft twists and turns, and by well-timed exposures to well-heated fires, and by applying his range of specialist tools, transformed the blob into a beautifully styled fern-frond, captured in the stage of uncurling, with tints of forest green and light dancing through its contours. That’s the way it works. A craftsman brings his mind and soul to work to make something of worth to marvel the eye.

The logic still compels me to see my origin in the hand of a Creator, and not arising from some freak fusion of physics. But that seems increasingly to be the minority position. Today’s faith can conceive of the forest frond arising quite apart from any Creator. But such faith seems to me to be more of the wishful kind, with its edgy hope that the Creator isn’t there. “Otherwise he might intrude!” He might indeed, but does it never occur that the “intrusion” might be to bless and enrich and expand our lives? After all, he did make the frond to unfurl.

“Your father was not a glassmaker” was a familiar cry in our household growing up, when someone interrupted the view to the television. But now I take it to be a statement of faith. Glassmakers are clever, but who can calculate the wisdom and artistic skill of the Maker of men?

DM 18^th June 2013