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LINKS TO THE SERMONS |
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| “Prayers for the ‘Possum” There used to be an opossum that walked the back fence of our house. It started appearing soon after we moved here and would show up every three or four days just to harass the dog, who was the first to discover and announce the possum’s presence. For all of Samson’s frantic barking and gyrations as he tried to leap up to fence level, the possum was totally unaffected. He couldn’t have been more disinterested in the presence of that silly dog or me as I went out to take a photo and to show the creature to Emily. She, being born in Hawaii, had never seen an opossum and took delight in its presence as it looked disdainfully down its long nose at us as if we were the intruders into its territory rather than the other way around. We went to see the possum every time Samson announced its presence and sometimes when we did not it would venture down the fence just outside our dinning room window – to get a closer look at us or to see if we had moved out of its territory and away from its personal expressway which we called a fence. The opossum doesn’t walk our back fence anymore; I miss it. I scooped up its battered body with a shovel near the edge of San Bernardino road where it had made an attempt to cross. I wondered if it just started across when the car hit it or if it was returning home after a successful crossing and was perhaps inches away from a satisfying evening of foraging. I wonder what the person who was driving the car felt at the moment of impact. I wonder if he or she considered stopping. I wonder if they thought about the incident later. I wonder if they thought about it at all. There was no memorial service for the opossum and no mention in the obituaries – didn’t even bury it. I put it in a cardboard box and placed it in the dumpster and Monday morning the loud clanging of machinery assured me that it was gone – out of my life, out of my thoughts – but every once in a while, usually just after dark, I look out at the back fence for any sign of those flashing yellow eyes looking down that long dignified nose and I miss the opossum. The expressway we built for the squirrel is higher up and provides safe passage across the busy street. We call it a telephone wire. But, no such bridge existed for the possum. I might have brought a petition to city council to have a possum bridge built but I doubt whether they would have taken the request seriously. Although I did read a piece about a community in England that had a nightly migration of frogs across the road. They were being crushed by the dozens by the traffic returning home. If you wonder why the frogs crossed the road the answer is obvious, to show the chicken how it’s done. The end of the story is that the government actually went to the considerable expense of building a tunnel under the road so the frogs could cross safely. What disturbed me about the story is the rationale they gave for the expenditure of public funds. They said that the frogs created a traffic hazard; people breaking to avoid the frogs caused rear end collisions. So, they insisted, the tunnel was not for the well being of the frogs but of the humans and that makes it okay. But I think, secretly, some guy on the city council voted in favor of the tunnel just because of the frogs. Probably didn’t tell anyone but he knew it in his heart – and God who looks upon the heart, knew and smiled. What I am talking about here is not sentimentality,
it is reverence for life. Albert Schweitzer coined the phrase and
wrote a book by that title. Here is a quote. Schweitzer was not a sentimentalist. He understood the necessity of killing animals in order to eat and of spraying the roaches under your kitchen sink. But you don’t take that life lightly, you don’t take delight, as some do, it the process of life taking, your respect life; you reverence it. In that old movie, “Ryan’s Daughter,” a group of fishermen have just come home with their catch. One of them has a giant lobster which he is swinging in the air by one of its massive claws. Finally the arm breaks and the lobster goes flying evoking laughter from the crowd – all except for the village priest who rushes out to confront the burley fisherman, red faced and with clenched fists. He scolds the man in direct terms about his treatment of the lobster, embarrassing him in front of his peers. When the man protests and asks why the priest says in a loud voice, “Because it’s one of God’s created.” Schweitzer wrote, “To the man who is truly ethical all life is sacred, including that which from the human point of view seems lower in scale. He makes distinctions only as each case comes before him, and under pressure of necessity. But all through this series of decisions he is conscious of acting arbitrarily, and knows that he bears the responsibility for the life which is sacrificed.” The possum on San Bernardino Road wasn’t as important say as the person in the ambulance that may have hit it with its siren blaring. And the people who drove by later and saw the little creature there with the life’s blood coming out of its nose, were not obligated or expected to stop or to give it a second thought. But, if anyone did, it is according to Schweitzer, an indication of the high ethical development and spiritual depth that understands the connectedness of all of life. When any life is diminished, all life is diminished. When we advance as a society to the point where we are no longer connected to that truth it makes it less likely that we will secure a connectedness with our God – the One who takes note when even a lowly sparrow falls from a branch. When we loose empathy for all of life we soon loose empathy for any life, even other human life and soon we drive past the broken lives and desperate situations of our brothers and sisters as easily as we did the dead possum on San Bernardino Road. Then we wonder why faith is so weak and spiritual life so illusive and thin – and God, so remote. We are part of this creation – the opossum and the sparrow are us – if we don’t know that, we can’t know the God who made it so at the moment of creation. We humans like to think of ourselves as a separate creation; we are spiritual beings we say, in the image of God temporarily located in the body of a vertebrate mammal but meant for heaven and eternity. The Book of Genesis will have none of that; we are created from the earth, for the earth and to the earth we shall return. According to the second chapter of Genesis, the other animals were created as companions / helpers for the man. And notice that God gave the man the honor of naming them. Naming was a huge responsibility in that culture; the name you gave a person defined his character and to some extent his destiny. God expected the man to have caring insight into the characters of these other members of his creation so that he could name them appropriately. He charged the man with the responsibility for the care and wellbeing of the other members of creation, not because he was separate from them but because he was one of them. Along the way the “dominion” God gave us was exchanged for” domination,” and animals and all of earth’s resources became something to use and abuse, not to respect and cherish. Albert Schweitzer said that this loss of connectedness with the rest of the created order is part and parcel of the same decline in spiritual vitality and connectedness with God; and further, that a measurable symptom of that condition of spiritual and moral depletion is the lack of a reverence for life, even that of a possum who, one night, didn’t make it back across San Bernardino Road. I miss the possum and I’m glad I do, because
I think it means that something is still alive in me that aligns
me with the Spirit of God who was introduced to us first as Creator,
and in my sadness over the loss of that little life, God is pleased. |
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