The Day I Pretended to Be Grass
A different perspective on the love of God
‘If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire…’ (Matthew 6:30)
The implication being that God loves us more than He loves birds, flowers and grass. But a few months ago I was in the garden watching grass grow (yes, I went through a phase of that when it was last warm enough to sit outside) and it occurred to me that He loves us the same way He loves those things. And I find that weirdly comforting.
Here’s what I mean. God is a being with intelligence, agency and the ability to communicate and so are we, so it makes sense that we would relate to Him in complex ways. But if I only engage with Him the same way I would another person I can’t help but analogise my relationship with Him to my relationships with other people. And that makes for mixed results.
It’s true that your interactions with God echo your interpersonal interactions in many ways. If He gives you something you thank Him, if you’ve messed up you apologise, if you need help you ask for it. Of course there’s also a fundamental asymmetry there: God never needs to apologise to you or ask for your help (He can ask you to do things for Him, but that’s not quite the same).
But the biggest difference between God’s attitude towards you and your family and friends’ attitudes is that they’re making an effort with you, and He isn’t.
No matter how unconditionally someone loves you — and only rarely does a friend’s love even approach unconditionality — their responses to you are still subject to the vagaries of their emotions. They can be angry with you, disappointed in you, hot and cold with you depending on your behaviour, or just not in the mood to see you. Their sensitivities and vulnerabilities mean you have to be careful with them to an extent. You have to keep them happy.
Personally, it’s hard for me not to project the tension this engenders onto my relationship with God. I haven’t got much done today, does that mean He’s angry? Surely He’s going to withhold something from me until I’ve got my act together a bit. Maybe if I knock out 1000 words later and apologise to Him for that thing I said behind my friend’s back He’ll be in a better mood with me. Maybe I’ll wait till I’m in a better mood before I pray today, I’ll be more lovable then.
Those are the kind of thoughts that were going through my mind when I decided to chill out for a second and watch the grass. Suddenly a switch flipped and I was the grass — not a thinking, planning, sinning being, just grass. My only job was to sit there growing, no concepts, no thoughts, no emotions. The sun shone on me with a continual warmth and light, not because I deserved it or because it wanted anything back but because that’s what the sun does. Consistent, impersonal benevolence.
This is a fundamentally different way of conceiving of God, taking you out of the story of judgement, redemption and obedience and putting you in another story where you act as naturally as a tree or a leaf and God acts like the Great Way of the Tao Te Ching, which ‘runs to left, to right, the ten thousand things depending on it, living on it, accepted by it…Clothing and feeding the ten thousand things, it lays no claim on them and asks nothing of them’ (ch. 34). It’s a language of being rather than doing, of balance and harmony rather than sin and forgiveness.
There are glimmers of this way of thinking in the Bible — in another part of the Sermon on the Mount Jesus says ‘[Your Father] causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous’ (Matt. 5:45). But I think it’s fair to say that a good chunk of the New Testament is concerned with sin, redemption, what pleases God and what doesn’t. And I’m not saying that this way of looking at the world is wrong.
But it’s also true that God made the sun, the rain, good people and bad people, and that His love suffuses them all. If this love’s greatest expression is redemption, that doesn’t take away from the fact that it’s always existed, applies to everyone equally and flows as automatically as sunlight. If your openness to the love determines how much of it you can become aware of, experience and mobilise in your own life, that doesn’t mean it isn’t always there, any more than music stops playing when you put your fingers in your ears.
Praying in the traditional sense of thanking God, asking Him for things and apologising when I get stuff wrong has a function — several functions actually: it acts as a spiritual detox, keeps the channels of communication open, stops my ego distorting my worldview and applies the love of God to my mundane situations so I can live a happier, more fulfilling life. But it’s very easy to slip into thinking of God’s affection in human terms — with all the doubt and insecurity that entails — if I don’t continually remind myself that His fundamental attitude towards me doesn’t depend on me doing any of these things.
That day in the garden, taking my sentience and complexity out of the picture for a couple of minutes helped bring all of that home to me. The “subhuman” analogy of sun and grass became an ironically useful analogy for God’s superhuman love, which isn’t fazed by my failings, worries, inadequacies or past actions. I just am, and I am loved.
I thought I’d throw my not-thought experiment out there in case anyone else might benefit from flipping the switch occasionally. Be grass and see how the sun feels.