Natural instinctBy the Revd David Burgess
In the last few months, it’s been hard at times to escape the feeling that the animal kingdom has it in for me.
We’ve not yet been able to make the big television switchover on our Freeview set-top box – extra channels, better reception on some existing channels and new slots for others – because Amber, the vicarage Labrador, ate our remote control a week before the change was due.
Amber’s misdemeanour came hard on the heels of Ewen the goat who, back in the summer, decided to make a meal of some of my orders of service at the Cholesbury Blessing of Pets.
On reflection, of course, it’s clear that both creatures were following their natural instincts. Amber, a pack animal, was playing with a toy which she’d seen the rest of the pack use on a daily basis. Ewen was simply being what he is – one of Nature’s most efficient eating machines.
Human beings have their instincts as well. It’s a rare man or woman who can stand at the top of a cliff, for example, and not feel a sense of vertigo. It’s good for the survival of our species not to take risks in high places.
How about other instincts? Do we have a natural instinct for God? I believe so; I think there’s a built-in human response both to the created world and to the creator behind that world. It’s a response to beauty and order and evokes a reaction of awe and wonder.
This instinct is highlighted in Christian teaching. The first two chapters of Genesis are full of it, and even Paul in the letter to the Romans teaches that we should be able to relate to God simply by experiencing the world around us.
At the other end of the teaching scale, an appreciation of the natural order is part of the RE Curriculum. A few years ago one of our schoolteachers and I shared a running joke for several terms about how many opportunities for awe and wonder we could give our youngest pupils.
There’s a name for this – it’s called ‘natural theology’. Modern Western Protestantism doesn’t set much store by it, but it’s one of the prime targets for the new breed of militant atheism which sees the order of the world and our reaction to it as blind-chance evolution and biological process.
If we believe in a creator God and the response of his created people, why aren’t things better? What gets in the way? Sadly, it’s sometimes the church itself that stifles instinct; equally often, though, it’s the pull of a world that seems year by year further on the way downhill to chaos and madness.
So, why not cultivate your natural instinct if you believe in it? It shouldn’t be hard to do in an environment like ours. You can see it as a stage in your spiritual journey, or an antidote to the regulated, counter-intuitive lives that so many of us lead – or both.
Be appreciative; be responsive; be alive to the possibilities that God has in store; you never know where it might lead you!