Who’s in control?

Philip Allum contemplates the beautiful chaos of creation

Just about the most disturbing sentences in the current Advices & queries are in number 11, and they stick with me for days whenever I hear them spoken in Meeting. They read: ‘Be honest with yourself. What unpalatable truths might you be evading?’ In my personal case, there are lots of these, both of the unpalatable and evaded variety, but, collectively, one of our most evaded truths is that we, in modern Western society, love the illusion that we are in control of everything. It’s conveniently neat and tidy.

Our technological and scientific culture has given us the means to provide many Europeans with comfortable lifestyles. We have information at our fingertips and, at the click of a mouse, all sorts of products arrive at the front door. We can modify our bodies, or our environment, or travel to almost anywhere in the world in a few hours. We are genuinely surprised when any of this goes wrong.

Theologically, I’m very much a theist and a Christian, but, even so, I’m not so sure that even God is actually in control of everything – if by ‘control’ we mean that God is pulling all the strings. If sections of humanity decide to go to war with each other, how much does God intervene? Does God exercise control by suspending physical laws in order to prevent destructive earthquakes and hurricanes? Our collective experience is that surely God doesn’t do either.

When I was a line manager for a large commercial organisation, the culture was one of proactivity, where everything had to be under total control. Using words such as ‘hopefully’ about anything would result in a black mark. This was probably alright for the narrow world of the telecommunications industry, but is it true of life in general? I don’t think it is.

As I reach my diamond jubilee birthday, I realise that much of what happens to us in life appears to be accidental, or even random. The people we meet, the relationships we form, the opportunities that present themselves – many just seem to appear: the chance meeting with someone we’ve not seen for ages, the fortuitous noticing of an advertisement in a publication we don’t normally read. Is it all a tangle of chance and probabilities? Or is the hand of God at work there somewhere?

I believe that God works through all of these, even through our seeming failures. Our own agendas and objectives seem to be thwarted, but God picks up the bits and the muddle and the mess, and creatively makes something from them.

Advices & queries number 10 speaks of prayer. This is largely absent, I feel, from our Meeting for Worship today; some say because it’s missing from our lives. But I believe in the power of prayer and keep a daily prayer diary, by which to pray for those I know are in need. Yet I have enormous difficulty with prayer that purports to tell God what to do. For me, this is presumptuous, bordering on the blasphemous. God will decide outcomes, not me.

My favourite part of the Old Testament is the Book of Job. Towards the end (38:4), there is a theophany passage where God asks Job: ‘Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me if you have understanding.’ This puts me in my place. The power of this was brought home to me while sitting dumbfounded at the sight of water thundering over Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, with my partner shouting this passage out loud.

There is much majesty, beauty, mystery and, yes, chaos, both in God and his creation.

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