IN “As You Like It”, Shakespeare says there are ‘tongues in trees, books in running brooks and sermons in stones.”

Honeymooners touring the Highlands on a glorious summer day would probably agree with Shakespeare. But one wonders what the tongues would say if a falling tree killed one of them, or how the book might read if one drowned in a brook. One wonders also what Goliath might have made of the sermon in stone, when the stone hit him square in the middle of the forehead.

Faith has to take account not only of the beauty and wonder of many aspects of the natural world, but also its cruel aspects. Nature speaks with two entirely different voices. As well as attractive little lambs and magnificent scenery, there are fearful floods and earthquakes, poisonous razor-snakes and malaria bearing mosquitoes.

The natural world provides no definitive answer to the question of whether the Creator has a kindly or cruel nature. Starting from wild flowers scattered profusely along river banks, and healthy new born babies, some might deduce that God is kindly disposed towards us. But starting from other aspects of life on earth, foxes devouring little lambs, babies born with incurable diseases, loved ones suffering from Parkinson’s, one might reach the conclusion James Thomson reached in his book City of Dreadful N ight. His verdict was that if there is a God at the back of the world, we need to forgive him, not He us.

When Jesus spoke about the cruel death he was almost certain to suffer at the hands of those implacably opposed to him, a perplexed and somewhat fearful Philip said: “Tell us what God is really like.” “He who has seen me” said Jesus, “ knows what kind of Father God is.” These words are central to my faith. I believe the clue to the mystery of life and God, is to be found in the life, character and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth.

That was what Dorothy Gurney tried to say in her often misunderstood poem “God’s garden”, a poem with the well-known lines, “One is nearer God’s heart in a garden than anywhere else on earth.”

The Garden she was referring to was not a beautiful flower garden, but the Garden of Gethsemane.

In the last verse she tells us how she feels near God’s heart in a garden, “for he broke it for us in a garden, under the olive trees.” When tragic things happen, little comfort is to be found by gazing at heather clad hills or into the fathomless spaces between the stars, but many have derived comfort by meditating on what happened in Gethsemane and later on Calvary.

Jesus, like countless others who have suffered greatly, cried on the Cross: “My God why?” But that was not his final cry.

He who knew so much more about God than I will ever know, was still certain in that dark hour, that back of all things there is One who loves us, and from whose love nothing can ever separate us. His final prayer was: “Father into your hands I commit my spirit.” Many, when life tumbles in, have derived comfort from these words.

The apostle John lived through the titanic struggle of the infant church against the mailed fist of the Roman Empire. He had seen people tortured and mauled in the arena for their faith. Yet it was he who as an old man summed up his faith in the words, “God is love.”

Christian faith in a loving Father was not dreamed up in some ivory tower remote from life’s forbidding facts. Though like you I am often baffled and driven to distraction by the awful things that happen to some people, yet I am persuaded that Jesus’ reading of life is the right one, that behind the mystery and at times the awful pain, there is One who is not untouched by human suffering, One who suffers with us in our suffering.

The famous army Padre Studdert Kennedy, who during the First World War served in the blood drenched trenches of Europe, wrote: “I back the scent of life against its stink.”

So do I.