Chaos in the Skies

This morning’s headline news is that Heathrow Airport is closed throughout today. A fire at an electrical substation caused local residents to be evacuated from their homes and schools to be shut. More than 1,350 flights are affected with diversions, cancellations and delays.

One headline reads ‘Chaos in the Skies’. It made me smile. It’s an emotive word often used by politicians and preachers to exaggerate a point…

We use the word ‘chaos’ in so many contexts… chaotic houses, chaotic meetings, chaotic lives… we talk about chaos caused by the weather, wars, governments… It’s about extreme disorder and confusion.

Apparently the word comes from the Latin ‘chaos’, and the Greek ‘khaos’ which means ‘abyss, that which gapes wide open, that which is vast and empty’… similar to a chasm.

The ‘Etymology Dictionary’ goes on to tell me that the meaning ‘utter confusion’ comes from its theological use of chaos in ‘Genesis’…

My Bible starts with the Genesis creation narrative: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

The void at the beginning of creation, the confused, formless, elementary state of the universe is ‘chaos’. There’s certainly chaos in the skies! God creates an ordered universe from disordered confusion; He creates cosmos from chaos.

I’m no scientist, but it seems to me that ‘Chaos theory’ seems paradoxical, connecting two ideas that appear to be incompatible. It’s the study of chaos… the apparently random, unpredictable, confused and complex; it’s about related the rules, laws and theories… But how can laws be made about the unpredictable?

Perhaps somewhere there comes God, who works through the paradoxical and incomprehensible, bringing peaceful order out of confusing chaos in the universe, in our world, and in our minds, hearts, relationships and ordinary daily lives.