Praise God from whom all blessings flow - Part 2

 A reflection in the June 2026 issue of Grapevine, the parish magazine of the Nenagh Union of Parishes

The Doxology, a much loved hymn of praise, was written in 1674 by Thomas Ken, Bishop of  Bath & Wells

Praise God from whom all blessings flow!

Last month, I began to tell the story of creation in a new way, based on the findings of modern science. It does not conflict in any essential way with the old story we read in Exodus, in which we learn that God sees all he has made to be very good, and that we human beings are made in his image.

The God-given laws of nature are fine tuned to make possible the galaxies, stars and planets we observe. Through the continuing process of evolution, the same laws of nature have led to the bewildering diversity of life on our planet Earth, and quite possibly elsewhere in the universe. Evolution is the way our God continually creates diversity.

Evolution is not just a blind force of competition, in which the strong survive and the weak die – ‘nature red in tooth and claw’. More important is the natural selection of cooperative behaviour. Looking back over the history of life on Earth, we see our Creator at work building relationships between his creatures, and communities in which all may flourish. It would be a blasphemy not to cherish these relational communities.

Evolution favours cooperation between diverse creatures, building ecosystems: relationships and communities in which they flourish mutually. Consider, for example, the beautiful three-cornered dance between insects which pollinate plants in return for nectar and pollen, plants which produce fruit and seeds to feed animals, and animals which disperse seeds to make new plants.

Evolution also favours altruistic behaviour in social species. Sterile worker bees and ants tend and protect the eggs and larvae of their fertile sister the queen. Most birds and mammals will defend their babies even at the cost of their own lives.

Praise him all creatures here below!

So what about human beings like you and me? At our best we extend the altruism we see in other social species to our pets, to strangers, and to the rest of creation. This is the basis of the human emotion we call love. It is an echo of the self-giving love of God we discern in Jesus Christ. We are made in God’s image.

God has forged us through evolution from clever apes. Of all God’s creatures here on earth, we are the only ones who can imagine a future, make plans to achieve it, and act to do so. But for all our cleverness, our human plans do not always work out. Our future is always uncertain. We do well to remember that we are not masters of the universe: God is, and his laws don’t change.

Just as God has made us clever, so God has made us in his image to be moral beings, to be souls. Souls with the capacity we call conscience to distinguish right from wrong, truth from lies, love from hate - and to prefer good to evil, as he does. It is through our conscience that God’s Holy Spirit inspires us to make the right choices, so reaping a harvest of good which nourishes our souls.

We are not masters of our own souls, any more than we are masters of the universe. Our souls are as God made them, with free will, vulnerable to temptation. It is hard to be good. All too often we fail. We name that sin. And when we fail and sin, the evil we do poisons our soul.

But like a loving father, God does not wish the consequences of our sins to poison our souls, to consign us to eternal death, cut off forever from his loving kindness. He has given us the example of the life and ministry, death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ to show us how to escape that fate. If we repent of our sins, God will forgive them. And as St John tells us, Jesus prays to his loving Father for us, asking him to give us eternal life in him, ‘And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent' (John 17:3).

Eternal life is not the same as everlasting life. Our lives are finite. They are like threads winding through the four dimension of space and time, interacting with the threads of other creatures. They begin at our conception and end at our death, after which all that makes us human is dispersed. But our God is outside the confines of space-time. He loves us unconditionally. He rejoices at the love we show for each other and for his other creatures summed over the whole of our life-thread, while he weeps over our failures to love as he does. Our resurrection to eternal life is not physical. It is to abide in the timeless presence of our loving God, who knows and loves us completely, from our first beginning to our very end.

Praise him above the angelic host!

So what of the future? We human beings are the product of an unfinished process. God continues to create the universe he loves, and our species, through evolution.

The French palaeontologist and Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin suggested that the biosphere of which we are part is evolving to become a noösphere. This consists of human minds and souls interacting with each other and with the rest of creation, moving toward a final point of unification with God. He named this the Omega point. He speculated that it resembles the Christian Logos, namely Christ, who draws all things into himself, who in the words of the Nicene Creed, is ‘God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God, through him all things were made’.

If Teilhard de Chardin is right, then perhaps we imperfect human beings will evolve over countless eons towards the Omega point of unity with God. Perhaps our descendants in the far distant future will become the angelic host, perfected saints!

Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost!

Praise God from whom all blessings flow! Part 1

 A reflection in the May 2026 issue of Grapevine, the parishmagazine of the Nenagh Union of Parishes

The Doxology, a much loved hymn of praise,
was written in 1674 by Thomas Ken,
Bishop of Bath & Wells

Praise God from whom all blessings flow!

I am starting to write this on Earth Day, 22^nd April, marked around the world as an annual opportunity to celebrate our wonderful, living planet. On this warm, sunny spring day, flowers are blooming, birds are singing, trees are leafing, and bees are buzzing. How can we not express our joy through praise to the Creator?

Genesis chapter 1 tells us how God made Earth and the heavens, and living creatures, including people like you and me. It is a myth, but like the best myths, within it we find important nuggets of timeless truth. Two are central to our faith, I think. First, God sees all he has made to be very good. And second, we human beings are made in the image of God our Creator.

Today, modern science compels us to tell the story of creation in a new way, perhaps even more glorious in its breadth and depth. The story is still being written, and there is much we do not understand yet. But it does not, I believe, conflict in any essential way with these timeless truths. Here is a precis of the story.

The Universe came into being from nothing around 13,000 million years ago in a hot burst of energy. After inflating rapidly, it started to cool, and the simplest elements, hydrogen and helium, began to clump together into the first galaxies and stars. The stars shone brightly through thermonuclear reactions, making ever heavier elements. They lived and died, and many exploded as super-novae, spewing heavy elements into clouds of cosmic dust. From this dust new generations of stars were born, and are still being born, many with planetary systems. About 4,000 million years ago our Earth formed, a small planet circling the star we call the Sun, on the outer edge of the Milky Way, one of innumerable galaxies in the observable universe.

If fundamental physical constants were not much the same as they are, none of this would have happened – there would be no galaxies, no stars, no planets, and no Earth on which biochemical processes could generate living beings. What an extraordinary fact. The God-given laws of nature have been fine-tuned to make our living world possible!

Praise him all creatures here below!

Life began to appear on Earth thousands of millions of years ago. At first simple single-celled organisms, like bacteria, using DNA as an instruction template, evolved to feed, grow, and reproduce. They competed against each other. They ate each other. But some evolved to cooperate, to form relationships with other cells where both benefited. Some even became engulfed in the cells of others. This is the origin of cellular structures called organelles, such as mitochondria, which power respiration, and chloroplasts, which make sugars from light, water and CO2. Both were once free-living single cells, and still retain their own DNA.

Complex, multi-cellular organisms, plants, fungi and animals, evolved as cells divided and differentiated into specialised organs. Bacteria and viruses evolved to live inside these creatures, forming communities such as our gut microbiome, so important to health. Later, fungi began to cooperate with higher plants to form the mycorrhizal root systems, which are essential for most plants to grow well.

The Creator fine-tuned the laws of nature to make the process of evolution possible. Evolution is the way he has made the bewildering diversity of life on Earth today, all descended from a single common ancestor. He will continue to use evolution into the distant future to create new worlds and communities we cannot even imagine.

Until recently, people have thought of evolution as driven by competition to eat and reproduce – ‘nature red in tooth and claw’. But more important than competition is cooperation, the selection of cooperative behaviour. By cooperating in different ways, different creatures flourish better together than they can apart. Looking back over the history of life on Earth, I see our Creator at work building relationships between his creatures, and communities in which all may flourish. It would be a blasphemy not to cherish these relational communities.

Next month I shall examine what God has created human beings like you and me to be. We are souls, with the capacity we call conscience to tell right from wrong, distinguish truth from lies, and prefer good to evil. And I shall peer into the distant future to speculate what we may become.

Joc Sanders, 24^th April 2026

Deep despair and triumphant joy

An Orthodox Icon of the Parousia, Christ's 2nd Coming

A reflection in the April 2026 issue of Grapevine, the newsletter for the Nenagh Union of Parishes

I am writing this in the run up to Palm Sunday and Holy Week, with Good Friday and Easter almost upon us. The moods of the season, expressed in liturgy, swing wildly from triumphant joy to deep despair and back again. You may find it a bit unsettling, as I do.

We begin with Jesus’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem. Jesus rides into town on a donkey. Cheering crowds, lay their cloaks and palm branches in front of him. We sing joyful hosannas. Though we also listen to the long Passion Gospel, and hold up crosses made from palm leaves.

The mood darkens as Good Friday approaches. The Gospel readings intimate what is to come. In the Maundy Thursday Gospel, Jesus washes his disciples’ feet, setting them an example of servant leadership. And we act out the Last Supper in his memory, through which Jesus offers the bread and wine as his body and his blood.

On Good Friday, we mourn as we reflect on the enormity of Jesus’s death. We hear his anguished cry of desolation, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ And we re-enact his last earthly journey to Golgotha and his agonising crucifixion.

Then on Easter Sunday we greet his resurrection with abounding joy and shouts of ‘Christ has risen!’.

It is as if the very weather at this time of year echoes these wild swings between joy and despair, in what the literary critic John Ruskin called ‘pathetic fallacy’. One moment we suffer an arctic blast with freezing rain and frosty nights, and the next we rejoice in balmy sunshine. One moment our spirits are lifted by the spring flowers, and the next they are dashed by the sight of frosted shoots.

And this year, as bystanders, we see and hear the frightful news of wars and destruction in Ukraine, the Middle East, and other places in our broken world. Cruel national leaders stride across the world as if they were Gods, spouting venom and launching brutal attacks, then pivoting to words of peace, as markets gyrate and rich men profit. We dread what is to come, as we hope and pray for peace.

But listen and absorb the Easter message, which is this. The kingdom of God has come near. Jesus’s Good Friday death and Easter resurrection promise us that evil cannot win. Our sins will be forgiven if we only repent, and we shall enter God’s eternal kingdom of peace and justice. Spring’s wild swings will turn to summer’s steady, fruitful days. Wars will end and tyrants will be overthrown. Let us face the future filled with Easter hope.

Holy Living

The Sermon on the Mount, detail, Jan Breughel the Elder

Published in Grapevine, the monthly newsletter for the Nenagh Union of Parishes, for February 2025

Recently, I have been pondering the Beatitudes, the blessings which Jesus taught to his disciples at the very beginning of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:3-10). Members of the Community of Brendan the Navigator, of which I am one, say them responsively every time we meet for worship, as we do every month in Killodiernan Church. They are a wonderfully concise summary of the Christian values we must seek to live by to receive God’s blessings. I see them as a recipe for holy living.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

We are poor in spirit when we know what we have is enough. Then we can give up the constant struggle to get more than we need, we can share what we have with those who have too little, and we will find true happiness.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

We mourn for the people and things we have loved but have lost. We may feel heartbroken, but when we remember them as a great gift of love, and not dwell on their loss, we will be comforted and find healing.

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

The meek respect and value other people. We must try our best not to be selfish, egotistic or narcissistic, so that we can work with others to make the world a better place for all.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

When we work passionately for what is right, just, true, and beautiful, we will attract kindred spirits, we will begin to make a positive difference, and we will be filled with life.

Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.

God cannot forgive us, thereby freeing us from corrosive guilt, unless we also forgive those who have wronged us.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. 

The pure in heart focus on the love that God showers on all his creatures. When we respond to this love by loving God and our neighbours, we see God’s love at work in the world.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

Peace is not just the absence of war. It is being free from hatred, free from threats of violence, free from fear. Jesus, the Son of God, urges us to love our enemies, and shows us how to deal with hatred, threats and fear. We must imitate him to be like children of God.

Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

It takes courage to speak up for what we know is right in the face of evil. But we must stand up for what is right, come what may. Nothing that evil can do to us would be worse than the shame of betraying the love God has shown us.

The Beatitudes are so easy to say, yet so very hard to live by, aren’t they? We cannot do so without God’s help, so we need to pray for it.

Loving Father, send your Holy Spirit to help us live by the teaching of your Son Jesus Christ, that we may live holy lives, and receive the blessings he promises. Amen