Today is a glorious day.  The sun is shining, the birds are singing, and my cat is desperate to escape outside to eat some grass.  After the long gloominess of winter, it’s good to be able to get out in the fresh air and enjoy the sun.

Creation is good.  Remember the first chapter of Genesis?  At every stage of creating our world, God declares that what is created is good - and in the case of human beings, very good.

That’s easy to believe in springtime.  But at other times of the year, or when we get bitten by a mosquito or suffer from the frailties of the human body, when we begin to wonder if creation is so good after all.  And there has been a long tradition in human philosophy and theology of believing in a dualism in which matter is deemed evil, and the mind or spirit deemed good.  In the early centuries of Christianity, this was expressed most clearly in Gnosticism, and was decreed heresy.  Recent years have seen a resurgence in interest in gnosticism, with the discovery of ancient gnostic manuscripts in the early twentieth century and their subsequent publication, and the inclusion of gnostic ideas in popular culture, such as Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, and Stargate SG1.

Part of that resurgence is, no doubt, a response to our experience of creation as distorted by evil.  Mosquitoes not only bite, but spread disease.  Our bodies are destroyed by disease or simply wear out.  We no longer live in the perfect creation of the Garden of Eden. 

But the promise of Easter, the promise of the Resurrection, is that creation itself will be renewed, and us along with it.  The full glory of that restored creation won’t be apparent to us until the whole earth is renewed under the final reign of Christ.  But even now, even imperfect as it is, creation is a testimony to God’s love for us.  And it invites us to give thanks to God, as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins does in his poem, Pied Beauty.

   Pied Beauty

    Glory be to God for dappled things—
        For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
            For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
    Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
        Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
            And áll trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

    All things counter, original, spáre, strange;
        Whatever is fickle, frecklèd (who knows how?)
            With swíft, slów; sweet, sóur; adázzle, dím;
    He fathers-forth whose beauty is pást change: 

                                                Práise hím.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), first published 1918.