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