Is a little chaos a good thing?

‘Heaven shall be here!’ says French monarch Louis XIV in the trailer for Alan Rickman’s new movie A little chaos. He’s talking about the gardense he's developing at the Palace of Versailles under the management of head gardener André le Nôtre, a historical ficgure who in the film appoint a fictitious assistant, Kate Winslet's toubled Sabine de Barra.

Heaven shall be here? Gardens seem to be close to God’s heart. ‘This is your Eden?’ says le Nôtre to Sabine of a garden she personally tends. He’s referring of course to the story of the garden at the very beginning of the Bible where man and woman walk with God. The Bible ends with a vision of heaven, seen as a garden city of life and joy. And the fulcrum on which the Christian story centres is Jesus’ return to life in the resurrection garden.

Gardens are powerful symbols. Our lives are gardens – what actions and attitudes do we allow to flourish there? How zealous are we about weeding? The church is a garden – each of us, with our distinctive qualities planted together to create an environment of peace and healing.

 Louis XIV was an autocratic king. He had le Nôtre create the garden for his own pleasure and delight at vast expense, and at the cost of hundreds of lives This colossal arrogance was typical of the man who took as his emblem the Sun, the source of all life

How different from God’s garden which we experience both as a spiritual dimension and as the material universe we live in. It was not created to make God appear wonderful, but because God is wonderful. It was not created for an elite but for all. And we are all gardeners helping in our lives and actions to tend and nurture, develop and heal the garden.

But is there room in the garden for a little chaos? That’s the question facing André le Nôtre in the film. The gardens he has designed have hitherto been formal in design, based on geometric patterns and shapes. Sabine has a different approach – on her way to her interview for the post as his assistant, she moves one of le Nôtre’s flower pots out of line in a spirited reaction to his rigid formality. It’s her view that the greatest beauty will be seen when freedom and randomness and unpredictability play their part in the creative process.

When he sees Sabine’s own ‘Eden’, le Nôtre describes it as ‘an adundance of chaos.’ Certainly she brings more than a little chaos to his ordered personal world as under the nose of his wife André feels, and acts on, a growing attraction for Sabine.

We would be well to be rid of moral chaos in the garden. I believe every problem we mourn in our world has as its root moral ambivalence and moral chaos as, Louis XIV-like we seek our own flourishing at the expense of the flourishing of others. Grief and sadness blight the flower-beds of our world.

But there’s another kind of chaos in the universe as scientists have discovered in the last 60 years. God’s universe is not a great orderly machine, utterly formulaic, completely predictable. Flexibility and randomness and sheer chance play their part in the on-going development of  the universe and life.

God likes the joyful unpredictability of this kind of chaos. God works with chaos and chance. One Christian, D. J. Bartholemew has written ‘Since chance is such an integral part of creation, it must be part of God's plan.’  Chance should be seen as ‘grist for the providential mill rather than as an obstacle to providential action.’

There must be a lesson here for those of us who like to run our lives and our work and our churches like le Nôtre ran his gardens – with total control. Perhaps we need to lighten up, to relax, to make room for a little chaos. Perhaps we are so intent on our own plans for God’s garden that we do not listen to the whispers of the Holy Spirit who keeps moving our plant-pots out of line, or hear the Spirit’s playful laughter when we push them back into place.

In real life, le Nôtre came from a humble background, and yet was close to the Sun King. It was said of him ‘the king liked to see him and talk to him.’ Jesus Christ is the true Sun King, the source of all life. He likes to see us. He likes to talk to us. Yet we are too busy to notice him sometimes, too busy to put our tools aside, and let the peace of the garden reign in our hearts, as we walk with our creator in the cool of the day.

(Christian Viewpoint column in the Highland News issue dated 23rd April2015)