This seems to be the Year of the Crocheted Afghan. I finished off the first one, the one I wrote about a few weeks ago, and gave it to Anna's mother for Anna to sleep under when she gets here. But I'd enjoyed the work so much that I've started another --this one to keep myself. Anna's afghan was a simple pattern of crocheted squares in cream and multi-coloured yarn. The one I'm working on (with the same yarns) is a more elaborate arrangement: each patch has a cream-coloured central medallion embedded in a coloured lace-like hexagon, finished with a line of dark blue. Very formal and Victorian and a lot more entertaining to crochet.

Crochet always strikes me as mildly miraculous: take a 99-cent hook, some rather mystical instructions ("ch 3, 4 dc in same sp, ch 3, 2 sc in next sp, ch 5, 2 sc in next sp.") and plain old boring cream-coloured yarn, and you end up with something that looks like heavy lace. A simple linear Something intricately folded and twisted and looped into a profoundly complicated Something that didn't exist fifteen minutes ago. Wow.

It occurred to me, as I tied off the end of the cream yarn, that maybe we have it all wrong when we say that God created Creation to have something to worship Him. I dunno: I can't read God's mind, of course. But it did strike me that creating stuff is simply, deeply enjoyable. The act of making something when nothing was there before--of turning plain old raw-material X into a more elaborate, organized, and satisfying creation Y--is a matter for delight, in and of itself.

I started the next round, the first coloured one. It's tricky; it usually takes a lot of ripping and restarting to get this right. One time, I realized that I'd done something wrong in the previous row, and I had to patch and improvise to make the pattern work. For some reason, as I did this, I thought of the panda's thumb, which isn't a thumb at all but an outgrowth of that knobby bit just where your hand joins your wrist, by the pulse point. Evolution, finding the panda's real thumb not useful for the job for whatever reason, got improvisatory and fooled around with this bit of bone. The resulting thumbish structure is useful for stripping the leaves off bamboo shoots, which is how pandas make their living. Nature does a lot of jury-rigging.

Does God have it all worked out beforehand, or does God jury-rig too? Is God the ultimate Master Planner, or does God just fool around sometimes? I thought about this while the hook whipped the yarn into stitches, and it occurred to me that my yarn has no voice in what it's becoming. In creating anything, you can't impose total control on something unless it's dead. I can make the yarn go exactly where I want it to go, according to the pre-existing pattern, because the yarn itself just lies there on the table, incapable of doing anything itself. It has no say in the matter.

But the first law of biology is "under precisely controlled laboratory conditions, living things will do as they damned well please." And there's also what we're finding out through chaos theory about the contingency of things--about how the flap of a butterfly's wing in Beijing can influence a weather front over Northern Labrador. Nature is saying: things are contingent; there is happenstance and unlikelihood and unpredictability. Or, in words of fewer syllables, some things are just the draw of the luck or the grace of God, depending on your viewpoint. Necessity is the smother of intention.

But this means, logically, either that our Creator is micromanaging everything at a level and to a degree that must drive even God a little loopy, or that this creation business involves a lot of serindipity. To me, at least, the latter makes more sense.

Another thing I remember from biology: you need accidents to give evolution something to fool around with - some chancy difference for it to get a handle on. Put an egg and sperm together and their respective genes will trade chunks, giving rise to subtly new patterns, no two quite the same (except in identical twins). The re-sorting is precise and delicate, because big changes to genes could be lethal. But while we are our fathers' and mothers' children, we are each of us unique because of this recombination. We are not merely A + B, but something different, because in our making A has traded tiny chunks with B. We are our inheritance, but not quite. If God hardwired this process into the conception of everything that breeds, then I think it says that God trusts Godself to work with the luck of the draw.

The more I think of the act of creation, the more I realize that crocheting is, in fact, quite crude and boring (if restful). Simple black-and-white rules, working with dead stuff, humph. Cooking, which (for me) involves a certain amount of messing around and making things up as I go along, is more creative. Agreed, the chances of disaster are also greater, but I'm a good cook and I rarely screw up.

And then there's parenting. Boy, if you want to talk about working creatively with the luck of the draw, not being able to run the process or inflict your will on the product--talk about co-creating with something with a will of its own, riding chance like a boat in white water....

God isn't our Clockmaker; God is our Creator, a giver not of my-way-or-the-highway directions but of the lightest and most loving touch now and then. He leaves us entirely free to make our own decisions, just as he leaves nature free with contingency and chanciness, because that is a higher order of creativity, and because God--who knows these things--trusts that it will all turn out just fine in the end, however bad it may look in the short term.

And so we are free to play with what God gives us--to become more and more deeply God's creatures, working with him in the process of creation, willing ourselves to be formed and re-formed. Or, conversely, to go off in some entirely different creation, just as we choose. God leaves us free. With care and practice and a willingness to bend, we can listen for God's directions, whispered softly. But God does not shout, or play the drillmaster, or jam us into a single mold. God does not keep us under God's thumb, because ultimately, God trusts that God's will will be done, and that we too will come round right in the end. Besides, what's the fun in running a bunch of automata?

The yarn on the table has no will of its own. It goes where I want it to go, and if the pattern screws up, it's my fault, not the yarn's, because the yarn has no say in the matter. I have a will of my own. It can go where I want to go, or it can go where God whispers it should go, and often the latter is harder than the former. But sometimes, God's will does indeed lead me into places of green pastures beside still waters, and when it doesn't, I know God will bring me out right in the end.

We're in this together, God and I: he wants my consent and is willing to trust me, and I accept that his will involves freedom and chance, as well a purpose too big for me to see, from where I stand. And I trust God.

We're dancing, God and I, and only in the life to come will I know what the pattern truly is. But I can dance securely, for God is beneath my feet and in the air around me, my Creator and my Lover--source of all serindipity (for what else is grace?) and a place of truest safety, even in the chanciness of this life.