Ants

As I sit in my conservatory / study writing this, I am surrounded by the tiny corpses of small winged black ants.  We have reached the time of year when ants fly in order to mate, and so hundreds of small winged males, and a smaller number of larger winged females have been leaving the nests, and climbing to the highest point they can, before flying upwards, where the highest flying male will mate with a female to begin a new dynasty.

Sadly, for one local nest, one of the highest places to crawl to seems to bring them through a small crack in the wooden frame to the inside of the window by my desk.  Theirs has been a doomed quest.  Dead ants litter the windowsill (I shall clear them away after writing this);  others have flown into the spider webs on my windows - left there because I am (a) fairly scruffy and (b) extremely tolerant of spiders:  they have been quickly spirited away by the local spiders, to provide a protein-rich diet for the foreseeable future.

The ants that do make it into the open air also have a fairly uncertain future.  Birds converge from far and wide on a column of flying ants, and you suspect that more will be eaten than escape.  The male ants don't last long once they return to earth, either, whether or not they've been successful in their mating endeavours.  They aren't needed any more, and for the remainder of the year an ant colony is entirely female.

So we learn of the prodigality of nature, revealed in so many ways.  So much seems to be wasted, so much is sacrificed so that the few may survive.  How this impacts on me as a Christian depends on how I'm feeling at the time, to be honest.  I can allow the prodigality of nature to act as a parable of the prodigality of the gracious God who pours into our lap "good measure, pressed down and running over."  But sometimes - quite often, in fact - it can be hard to go on believing in a kind and loving God, when his living creation seems to include so much which to our eyes is wantonly cruel and wasteful.  Certainly, it takes some effort to, as Tennyson wrote:
(trust) God was love indeed
and love Creation's final law,
tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw
with ravine, shriek'd against his creed.

Of course, this difficulty is nothing new.  It is addressed in the creation narratives in Genesis, as well as in the prophetic words of Micah and Isaiah.  Human life begins in the orderly tranquillity of a garden (though even then, the serpent, himself one of God's creatures, is waiting round the corner);  and when that peace is attained that is God's design for his people, "the lion will eat straw like the ox".

Anyway, no resolution to this discussion here.  I remain a believer, while having some sympathy with those who can't be.  Maybe what helps maintain this line of belief within me is the innate capacity I seem to have to appreciate beauty in things that are not of themselves beautiful, and to identify as cruel and wasteful events in the biosphere that, to the cold eye of biological analysis, do not in fact have moral content.  They are just the way life happens.  Meanwhile, I have some corpses of ants to tidy away from my window.