rom a few potted plants on the balcony of our townhouse, to a rented plot nearby, to a massive garden on the acre that’s now ours, my wife gardens. I am happy for her indulgence; my only request is that I don’t have to do any myself. The dirt, the heat, the bugs, ugh!—I hate gardening.
Though I hate the verb, I love the noun, and the other morning I saw this flower in her garden; I have no idea what: it wasn’t a rose, it wasn’t a sunflower (beyond that I’m clueless). It had five petals, deep purple and scarlet, draped open in an outrageous burst of color. Thin white stems rose out of the center, each one topped with little crowns of some shape or another. I stopped, captivated by the audacity of it all. It was mocking me, too; sticking out five lascivious tongues and saying, Come on, Cliff, using logic, reason, and science to understand me is like using paint chemistry to analyze a Van Gogh.
Maybe it didn’t quite say that, but why not? We Adventists can be so logical, so rational, so formulaic. We have this metaphysical cosmic view, the great controversy, in which all the various strands, pieces, threads, and particles of our beliefs fit quite nicely. There’s even some math—dates and charts, a prophetic calculus—to back up our claims, and they work quite well (certainly better than anything else I’ve seen).
Which is fine; our beliefs have to make sense. But we mustn’t dupe ourselves into thinking that we have it all figured out, or that it all can be figured out. From the baffling paradoxes of quantum reality, to an outrageous flower in my wife’s garden, to the elasticity of time and space, God has created a universe far too grand to be grasped by something as parochial, limited, and contingent as human reason—even reason founded on revelation.
Something about that flower penetrated a dimension where logic is too staid and inflexible to enter. How can equations—cold, dead, static—define a reality riotous with passion and creativity? What algorithm can explain the passion of King Lear, what formula the cooing of a dove, what law the foreboding of Van Gogh’s Wheatfield With Crows? Theories and formulas, principles and laws don’t make stars burn, woodpeckers peck, or mother bears feed their cubs any more than carving the letters e=mc2 on a piece of uranium will make a chain reaction.
In Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, young Werther catches something of this grandeur: “Oh, how thankful I am that my heart can feel the simple, harmless joys of the man who brings to the table a head of cabbage he has grown himself, and in a single moment enjoys, not only the vegetable, but all the fine days and fresh mornings since he planted it, the mild evenings when he watered it, and the pleasure he felt while watching it grow.”
So used to the majesty of creation, we forget what a miracle it and our existence in it is. That flower—the beauty, the audacity, and the outrageousness of it—transcended all theory, philosophy, and science. I gazed at the petals and pitied all Darwinists. How foolish is “the wisdom of this world” (1 Cor. 3:19). It looks at itself and, with its theories and presuppositions, replaces the obvious with the absurd. (For example, Bill Bryson, in A Short History of Nearly Everything, gave the following explanation for a godless creation: “It seems impossible that you could get something from nothing, but the fact that once there was nothing but now there is a universe is evident proof that you can.”)
That flower makes fools of us all. Some can look at it and declare—backed by scientific proofs, formulas, and theories (all peer-reviewed, too, mind you)—that it was an accident, that it wasn’t designed, that it exists by chance. Me, I looked at it and saw, besides my own ignorance, undeniable evidence of God’s love. Something in that flower gave me a young Wertherian sense of trust in the divine, something beyond words, beyond explanation, and thus beyond refute.
I love my wife’s garden (as long as I don’t have to work in it!).
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Clifford Goldstein is editor of the Adult Sabbath School Bible Study Guide. He is also featured on the Hope TV program Cliff!