Dancing with midges

Last Saturday, I went for a walk with my family round the beautiful Loch An Eilein in the Rothiemurchus estate near Aviemore. We enjoyed the stillness, the calm water, the friendly smiles of other walkers and cyclists.

We’d just passed the visitor centre cottage, the one with the word ‘duck’ on its low-ish lintel, which suggests that an oversize waterfowl lives there. I noticed a couple of people with what looked like bee-keepers’ nets over their heads. What was going on, I wondered naively. And then I realised – midges!

John Dempster with daughters Rebecca (left) and Bethany at Loch An Eilein

There were swarms of them, hundreds touching down on hands and neck and forehead every time we stopped, a persistent low-grade irritant.

275 years ago, when the increasing power of microscopes was opening up a new world for exploration - the world of what primary schools call ‘minibeasts’ - someone published a book called Insecto-theology. It sought to draw lessons about ‘the being and perfection of God from a consideration of the structure and economy of insects.’

Its author saw them, little creatures perfectly designed for what they have to do, as evidence of God’s wisdom and creativity. Many Christians now accept that God created life on earth through a process of evolution, perhaps setting up the conditions for life, and allowing life freedom to develop.

But whatever your view, midges remind people of faith of a big question. Why does God allow pain? Specifically, why did God allow annoying creatures like the Highland Midge to come into being? More specifically still, why couldn’t all Highland Midges be like the males, who simply eat flowers and dance in choreographed swarms to attract a mate? Only the females gorge on the blood of animals and humans to nourish the eggs forming within them. There must be a better way of providing food for frogs and fish!

Why is this wonderful, intricate, beautiful miracle of a world defiled by pain? Why is ‘nature red in tooth and claw?’

I keep that in my ‘big, unanswered questions’ drawer. Jesus said God knows each sparrow in its living and dying. And so you can bet God knows every last midge, and cherishes midges as examples of divine creativity.

I thought of the vast contrast between me (tall, reasonably intelligent, self-aware) with these minute midges crawling over my wrist. Yet this is contrast is nothing compared with the contrast between the most gifted and intelligent of human beings and the God who could create a million universes before breakfast, and yet is present in each atom, each breath.

I brush aside the midges as an irritant, but far from brushing me aside, God knows me, loves me, calls me. For God to become one of us in Jesus involved greater humility than it would for me to become a midge for a brief season of dancing beside a highland lake.

I guess we can learn from midges. They bite my neck because they are programmed to relentlessly further their own destiny. Yet I see in myself regrettable tendencies to take advantage of others, seeking to diminish them for my own ends.

But I admire the perseverance of the midges. So vulnerable to wind and rain, they persist with focus and determination in achieving their mission. Our mission as Christians is to reflect in our lives the love of that immense creator. Occasionally our words may be an irritant as we challenge those, whose wonder at creation is akin to worship, to consider a greater Wonder, more worthy of worship. But the sign of our presence should be not a red, swelling wound, but a healing touch which lingers long after we have gone, for we are agents not of the death and pain which so perplexes us, but of life.

And these midges remind me of the mist of doubts and temptations and fears which sometimes we find ourselves walking through. But God has given us a midge-net to protect us, if only we will wear it – the knowledge that we are loved, and cherished far more than birds and midges, for there is more of God in us than in them; we are God’s precious children.

Andrew Swift is an Episcopalian priest in Argyll who Tweets @midgedancer and blogs at ‘Dances with midges.’ He doesn’t say why he chose this title. But perhaps it’s a picture of our lives as Christians – dancing with midges, fully playing our part in this mysterious universe, not overcome by the stuff in our ‘unanswered questions’ drawer, learning to rejoice in the God who made us and loves us.

Last Saturday, we were not overcome by the midges, but danced with them. And when we’d made it back to the cottage, there was still no sign of the oversize duck, waddling towards the water.

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 15th October 2015)