KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 18 November
I am who I am
Does God exist? How do we know and how do we think about this question, if we even think about it at all? The story of the burning bush, read this week in Chapel, sets before us a profound image of Revelation. The bush is burning and yet is not consumed; out of it God speaks to Moses. It belongs to the ways in which things are made known to us, even things that go beyond human thinking and yet engage our minds.
An arresting scene, it gets Moses’ attention and, perhaps, ours, too, but it belongs to an understanding that is part of our world. Here the Judeo-Christian and Islamic understanding is at one with modern ‘science’ in denying the divinity of the natural world, despite the viewpoint of the English Romantics, though even Wordswoth admitted that “The world is too much with us; late and soon, /Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; – /Little we see in Nature that is ours; /We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!” Yet this was but a way of returning to nature as divine as something lost in the rationalism of the enlightenment and in the later material progress of the 19th century. It has its counterparts in various moments in the environmental movement, caught in the conflict between humanity and nature.
The story of the burning bush, burnt but not consumed or destroyed, is an image of Revelation, the idea of things made known to us which are not the constructs of our minds but which engage our minds. A bush that burns but is not consumed is not natural. Exactly. It is about what is beyond nature as that upon which the natural itself depends both for its being and its intelligibility. And yet communicated to us through the medium of the natural. In that way, it is sacramental.
Things are made known to us in various ways. The idea of Revelation does not override and contradict other ways of knowing; rather, it complements them and gathers them into the underlying premise of all our knowing. We can’t know without the assumption that things are knowable and that turns upon an intellectual principle. It is articulated here in the Moses story from Exodus.