Why bother to make something so beautiful?

From the Reverend Tim Ling, Vicar at St. Swithun 's Bathford

'Why bother to make something so beautiful?' We were sitting in The Crown enjoying a pint and talking about the extraordinary colours of the autumn leaves this year. 'Why bother to make something so beautiful?'

The Christian answer to this question is that God has made everything in his Creation to reflect his own character. The exuberance, the extravagance, the detail, the majesty, the delicacy all tell us something of who God is - of his love, his power, his tenderness, his generosity, his imagination. His glory.

He didn't need to bother to create something so beautiful. It's not as if he was bored and decided to create for something to do. It's not as if he was lonely and decided to create so he'd have someone to talk to. It's more as if God's own joy in simply being just overflowed in the creative act, bubbling over in a riot of colour and shape and texture and endless variety. The Creation 'speaks' of God.

Take the universe. As one writer has put it, 'Might the untracked, unimaginable stretches of the created universe not be a parable about the inexhaustible riches of his glory?' Or, as the Psalmist puts it, 'The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.'

The beauty of the autumn leaves takes our breath away; but, perhaps it is intended to do more than that. Is that vague sense of yearning we sometimes feel when we stand in silent awe before the wonders of nature due to the fact that we ourselves are created not simply to appreciate the glories of creation but the glory of the One who created it?

With best wishes, Tim