"There is this extreme difficulty or rather, impossibility, of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capability of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting, I feel compelled to look to a first cause with an intelligent mind … and I deserve to be called a theist." - Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859)
Rain can bring a time of renewal and reflection.
Virginia Wolf once wrote:
“A fine rain, a gentle shower, was peppering the pavements and making them greasy...where it fell on earth...it drew up the smell of earth. Here a drop poised on a grass-blade and there filled the cup of a wild flower, till the breeze stirred and the rain was spilt...
Down on the roofs it fell - here in Westminster, there in the Ladbroke Grove, on the wide sea a million points pricked the blue monster like an innumerable shower bath. Over the vast domes, the soaring spires of slumbering cities, over the leaded libraries, the museums, now shrouded in brown holland, the gentle rain slid down, till, reaching the mouths of those fantastic laughers the many clawed gargoyles, it splayed out in a thousand odd indentations...
the fine rain, the gentle rain, poured equally over the mitred and the bareheaded with an impartiality which suggested that the god of rain, if there were a god, was thinking let it not be restricted to the very wise, the very great, but let all breathing kind...share my bounty."
Perhaps some of us see sweet sentimentality in rain.
Perhaps others see it as no more than the scientific fact of rain.
Perhaps for some of us, rainy days conjure up melancholy thoughts and muddy memories as they stir up scars that can summon a storm of swirling senses of sorrow.
We all know that rain is formed by water droplets that have condensed from atmospheric vapour as they fall under perfect gravity to form an essential part of the life cycle of earth. If gravity were slightly more powerful, the universe would collapse and if gravity were slightly less powerful, the universe would fly apart. The precision of our universe is full of wonder because gravity is precisely as strong as it needs to be. "If the ratio of electromagnetic force to the strong force wasn't one percent, life wouldn't exist. What are the odds that would happen all by itself?" Funny that a TV show can be as insightful as this, if you know this reference.
Rewind to Roman era, a remarkable event rocked history precisely in a manner of wonder. Where descriptions in ancient literature around the cruelty of crucifixion are surprisingly sparse, four detailed accounts of the process by which a man might be sentenced to the cross have survived from antiquity. Remarkably, all four accounts described a crucifixion that took place on a hill outside the walls of Jerusalem in Golgotha ("the place of a skull" as it was called in Greek). A Jewish victim by the name of Jesus, a wandering preacher from an obscure town named Nazareth had been convicted of a capital offence against Roman order and died, according to Issac Newton’s calculation, either on 7 April AD 30 or 3 April AD 33 at the age of about 33. Anno Domini is the Latin for “in the year of the Lord” after the time of “Before Christ”.
Interestingly, there is no reason to doubt the historicity behind the essentials of a consistent narrative accounted by the four men named Luke, Mark, John and Matthew where even the most sceptical historians have tended to accept them. As eloquently put by Tom Holland, descriptions of Jesus' sufferings were nothing exceptional where pain, humiliation and the protracted horror of the most wretched of deaths over the course of Roman history were the common lot of multitudes.
Decidedly not the common lot of multitudes however, was the fate of Jesus after death.
The report in all four of the earliest narratives of Jesus - narratives called euangelia "good news" in Greek and known as gospels now, shared stories of Jesus who appeared to his followers not as a ghost but resurrected into a new and glorious form over the next forty days from his initial death.
The utter strangeness of it, for the vast majority of people in the Roman world and many empires since, did not lie in the notion that a mortal might become divine at a time when tales of gods and demi-gods reign and run riot.
What is startling is perhaps that a man who had himself been crucified might be hailed as God, the way he did it, with his own people in utter disbelief until his end. To the Jews at the time and even now, it is no more shocking than a total reversal of their most devoutly held assumption that could possibly have been imagined and inverted.
Centuries after the death of Jesus, even the Caesars had been brought to acknowledge him as Christ. Constantine, the first Christian emperor, banned crucifixion in the 4th century AD at a time when the cross came to serve the Roman people as an emblem of triumph over sin and death. In the rise and fall of his Byzantine empire and over a thousand years of the Byzantium history, the one thing that remained is the assurance that the cross provided to embattled people, that victory would ultimately be theirs even as the western half of the empire began to slip away from the rule of the Caesars with the fall to barbarian invaders. The Byzantine empire was born of an effete Greek culture, defiant in its Roman heritage and yet, defined by a fundamentally Christian identity rooted in the strong eastern Orthodox religion that prevailed through time immemorial.
Byzantium though was not the only Christian realm.
In the Latin-speaking West, a millennium and more after the birth of Christ, a fresh revolution brewed for the destiny of Christendom. In the Middle Ages, no civilisation in Eurasia was as congruent with a single dominant set of beliefs as was the Latin West with its faith in Christianity. The momentous understanding of God in which the emphasis was laid not upon his triumph but upon his suffering humanity led to years of yearning as people fix their eyes fully upon the cross.
The Jesus portrayed by medieval artists dying as a victim of the cross resonated with Christians in the medieval Europe who identified with the sufferings of their God as they looked upon the image of their Lord, nailed to the cross with blood and brutality, a thorn-crowned head of men and a messiah. This understanding of a God in human form turned past glory of deity and divinity upside down. Enshrined as it was in the very heart of medieval Christianity, is an understanding that could not help but lodge in its consciousness a visceral and momentous suspicion that God was closer to the weak than we thought.
In 1601, a painting was installed in a church that had originally been built to exorcise the ghost of emperor Nero that paid homage to the outcast origins of the city's Christian order. Caravaggio was commissioned to paint a crucifixion of the disciple Peter, of his execution and being put to death by Nero. To think that the spread of Christian faith arose out of 12 ordinary disciples who told the most unfathomable tale at a time of persecution is, well, wondrous to say the least. It is at once the most enduring legacy of classical antiquity and the index of its utter transformation.
Formed of a great confluence of traditions - Persian and Jewish, Greek and Roman - Christianity has long survived the collapse of the empire from which it first emerged to become one of the most hegemonic cultural system in world history.
Unlike Osiris, Zeus or Odin, the Christian God still goes strong.
In the European lands that acknowledged the primacy of the pope, there was only the occasional community of Jews to disrupt the otherwise total monopoly of the Roman Church at the time. It is this church and its influence that brought Christianity to Latin America in the 16th century and beyond, where approximately 90% of Latin Americans today are Christian and 57% of the total population in 2020 is Catholic. Even when the Catholic Christendom began to fragment and new forms of Christianity began to emerge, the conviction of Christians that their faith was universal remained deep-rooted which inspired them in their exploration of continents undreamed of by their forefathers - whether in Korea or in Tierra del Fuego, in Alaska or in New Zealand - the cross came to serve as the most globally recognised symbol that there has ever seen. One only need to look at the art deco statute of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro built in 1931 to realise that time itself has been Christianised.
How was it that such a “cult”, inspired by execution of an obscure criminal in a long vanished empire, came to exercise such a transformative and enduring influence on the world?
Christianity may be considered as the most influential legacy of the ancient world, and its emergence the single most transformative development in Western history. In fact, to live in a Western country is to live in a society that is still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions that is no less true for Jews or Muslims than it is for Catholics or Protestants.
Down in the land under, one need not look beyond legacies of our constitution, Westminster system and bill of rights debate to see the profound impact of Christianity and its influence over a culture that anchors how we think. Whether we like it or not, public holidays such as Christmas and Easter are part of our annual calendar and fabric of our lives. Like a flood-tide of Christ, how the belief that this Son of the one God of the Jews who died on the cross came to be so enduringly and widely held is a wonder. So much so that one cannot imagine what this world would be like without this once so scandalous an idea.
Now, a kaleidoscope is an optical instrument with reflecting mirrors tilted at an angle carefully constructed to show symmetrical pattern from its regularly repeated reflection.
Some might see it as a genius of random chance so that whatever coloured pieces of objects in a kaleidoscope, the rotation of multiple mirrored surfaces will make them beautiful anytime and anywhere.
Some might see it as the culmination of mankind's fascination with light and reflection since ancient times, now born out of a light polarisation experiment in 1814 by successive reflections between plates of glass and mirrors first carried out in the form of a circular arrangement of images around a candle with multiplication of the sectors formed by the extremities of the plates.
Yet to many, it is precisely men who are made in the image of God that brought life to ideas so curiously beautiful as part of the created world of an everlasting YHWH.
Like many things, there are those who rejoice, those who are sceptical and those who are appalled at this. Yet worldwide, almost a third of the planet's population of about two billion people subscribe to it.
So perhaps rain is what it is, made up of water molecules from a compound with a chemical formulate of H2O.
Perhaps it is simply as a matter of fact the main constituent of earth's hydrosphere and fluids of all known living organisms in which it acts as a solvent.
Yet, it exists in a world where earth's environment is close to water's triple point for it to be in solid, liquid and gaseous state, covering about 60% of our body, 71% of our planet's surface and over 90% of our hydrosphere. It is ice, fog, dew, cloud, snow, steam, ocean and all things vital when God separated the waters from the waters in Genesis.
Perhaps the universe is precisely the way it is, because that is how it is.
Perhaps the spread of Christianity is not so extraordinary out of the ordinary.
Or perhaps, ultimately, we have a God who has us exactly where He wants us to be.
With acknowledgment of Tom Holland’s Dominion and his copyright throughout this piece.
