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| Photo from the public domain
I want to
share a part of my past that has become an integral part of my today and
tomorrow. A quarter-century ago, I was privileged to have been granted a summer
(half of each week for over three months) lodged on an old ranch in southern
California. A time of healing and rethinking . . . and life-sustaining
revelation. It all happened that long ago, and still "happens," in a
sense, every day. Every new day.
During my
weekly sojourn there, I journaled daily. And left the pages in my files―until now. My book, Sky Mesa Journal,
will be out in a few months (Wipf and Stock Publishers). I have lifted a favorite
sketch from this work. I'd like you to meet a "beast" who spoke Life
to me: Used with Permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers.
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the incarnate, here
A donkey lives here. Linda is a sag of bones and ripple of tired muscle and thatch of unkempt pelt. Linda is a belly that looks ready to burst with foal; she is as old in donkey-years as Sarai was to Abraham, and her womb is long empty. Linda is two rheumy eyes that beg for something she cannot name and I cannot give. Linda leans with a sigh against the uncertain fence, or against my unfamiliar hand, and my heart aches. It is, perhaps, foolish to love a donkey so——and so quickly. But I am often foolish.
When I watch Linda, I am always struck by her patience. Donkeys are traditionally “temperamental.” Not so, not here! Linda lost her mate last winter. Surely the beasts of the field know grief and loneliness; I see it in her eyes. Perhaps it is this that gives her an air of quiet grace. That’s an unusual statement to make of a donkey——especially one with as broken-down a chassis as this one.
Somehow this gives me consolation——sharing this time and place with her. There is such a separation between human lives, the processes of getting along, getting ahead, getting by——and the natural world, that which we call wild, which struggles on, much too tangential to our own.
We see a flash or so of the other “order” in our passages between our life experiences, or perhaps more likely, when these experiences wane. We may dote upon the pets around our feet (and they are often vital, life-enriching―and sometimes, perhaps, our stead, our alter egos). But for most of us the breadth of the animal world exists mainly behind bars and barriers of place and purpose.
We cannot, by our minimal exposure, know the great heart of an elephant. Learn patience from the patterning of a covey of quail. Explain the explicit cosmos of the bee. We see too little value in the furry and feathery denizens of this planet, other than admiring their occasional beauty or oddity. Or granting our continual and anonymous picking clean of the bones of the edible.
But I see the incarnate, here―in this old gray lady-beast. An embodiment laid firmly, consciously, upon the earth-life all around me. In Linda’s gaunt dignity I am reminded of the promised Child who was carried lightly upon her once, the fullness in His mother’s womb.
I see the sorrow of the man-Christ, the weight of His burden for Jerusalem, for humanity . . . and how the weight of us all has bowed the back of this beast of burden.
It is not unkind to ride a donkey. But mankind has ridden too far, too long, on the back of nature, and has never reached Jerusalem.
Linda is “only” a beast, a domesticated animal rummaging at the fence-edge, at the far edge of a long and well-lived life.
When she leans her frowzy head against me, Christ weeps with us both.
And I would give life back to her, if it were my gift to give.
