Nature, Red in Tooth and Claw... and Original Sin

Hard on the heels of the delights of newborn life roars in the other end of the spectrum.  The other day, the yearling buck that I had kept back from last year's crop jumped his fence.  A fullblood buck, out of our good Eggsfile/Gauge buck who died New Year's Eve and an extremely aged South African based doe, I had high hopes for him.  Long, long, long body, square on his legs, heavily muscled, and pretty docile, I was starting to have fantasies about training him for the show ring (something I have never done).  I had yet to register him, tho we had let him breed our little Nubian doe when she came into heat out of season a while back.  He was with our fainting buck in a big pen, with plenty of hay and water.  He'd jumped the fence several weeks before, I found him browsing in the stubble of the vegetable garden, but quickly put him back where he belonged without any trouble.  I found the sagging spot in the fence and reinforced it, and all seemed well.

But this day, I had not been feeling well, and bestirred myself late in the afternoon to go check on the goats, for there are still several does yet to kid.  A few minutes earlier, I had let the dogs go out -- our fiery red heeler/Aussie shepherd cross and our big black lab/border collie cross. Part way from the house to the barn, I had a sudden "Something's not right!" intuition, looked around and did not see any dogs (who would normally meet me at the door to go with me), and heard a faint bleating of a goat from the back yard.  I started shouting the dog's names, and ran towards the sound.  I turned the corner, and saw the yearling buck lying at the back of the shrub rose bed against the fence, one of the dogs skittering away and the other nowhere to be seen.  When I got to the buck, he was sprawled out, breathing heavily.  I could see that part of his ear was torn away (Boer goats have big floppy ears, that are usually the first casualty of an attack).  I started feeling him over, and looking at him, but found only superficial bites along his shoulder and haunch.  No obvious tears or gashes.  But he was lying flat on his side, with the far leg tucked up under him.  Worried that leg might be damaged, I tried to turn him over.  He was too heavy, and I couldn't see.  There was no obvious pool of blood, but he had been run so hard he was too spent for me to get him up.

Going to phone a rancher neighbor, I found the missing dog hiding in their pen, spattered with blood.  I locked the other in, called the neighbor, and waited for him to come help.  The neighbor quickly arrived, and we started examining the wounded buck.  We got him turned, and found only superficial bites and pulled hair on the other leg.  But he was still breathing terribly hard and couldn't stand. We decided to move him into the barn, and I went to get the cart I use to haul hay bales around.  Ivan arrived home from school, and the three of us got him loaded and carted to the barn.  We gave him some fresh water, but he wouldn't drink it yet, dosed him up with some prophylactic penicillin and gave him some Banamine  to make him more comfortable (basically veterinary aspirin paste).  Not finding any obvious major wounds, we had hopes he would quickly recover.

Later that night, however, he was breathing very heavily.  It appeared that he was having serious lung troubles, there must have been some throat or lung injury we did not find externally.  After giving him some more Banamine and setting a heat lamp on him, I went to bed filled with foreboding.  And by morning, he had died.

The dogs.... I gave them both a bath that night to wash off the blood.  But what should I feel about them?  They go in the pens with the goats all the time, and there is no trouble.  It is only when a goat is out of place that they need to chase it, to corral it, to put it back where it belongs.  One dog alone (usually the heeler) can be a great help in rounding up an escaped animal or herd.  But when both of them are together, pack mentality sets in, the excitement of one feeds into the excitement of the other, and chaos ensues.  And when there is the taste of blood -- centuries of domestication evaporates and they revert to being dingos, coyotes, wolves.   It is only the sound of my voice, shouting across the yard, that snaps them back into being the "good boys" I'm used to.  I can scarcely blame them for being what they are.  They are dogs, bred to corral and move errant livestock, domesticated carnivores, not far removed from the pack hunters of their dim ancestry.  It is perfectly within their nature to do what they did.

[Man] Who trusted God was love indeed

And love Creation’s final law–

Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw

With ravine, shriek’d against his creed–

Who loved, who suffer’d countless ills,

Who battled for the True, the Just,

Be blown about the desert dust,

Or seal’d within the iron hills?

No more? A monster then, a dream,

A discord. Dragons of the prime,

That tare each other in their slime,

Were mellow music match’d with him.

O life as futile, then, as frail!

O for thy voice to soothe and bless!

What hope of answer, or redress?

Behind the veil, behind the veil. 

 ---Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam, from canto 56

Which makes me ponder the concepts of Original Sin and of Total Depravity.  Now I know that this would rank as probably The Most Unpopular Doctrine among progressive Christians -- not only in the present day, but centuries of Pelagians, Arminians, Eastern Orthodox, and others.  But my own Reformed and evangelical heritage held these as linchpins in their understanding of God's grace:  the greater the human predicament, the deeper the sin, the more impossible for humans to break free of their fallen nature, the correspondingly more wonderful, amazing, loving and gracious God is to redeem humans.  While Augustine held to a biological transmission of original sin, that had largely fallen aside among the evangelicals I studied with, where the idea of original sin had more to do with sin's universality among humans.  And Total Depravity never meant that humans could do nothing good or had lost the Image of God in which we are created, but that human nature was predisposed to oppose God apart from God's gracious initiatives towards humans.

In this view, sin is not so much discrete acts of disobedience to God's Law of Love, but an intrinsic, inborn, instinctual, approach to life that is essentially self-centered, self-idolatrous, and heedless of God.  I've liked Luther's image of sin being "curved in upon oneself."  Sinful acts, and sinful human systems, institutions, and structures, are the natural outgrowth of the universally sinful human nature. Of course humans commit genocide, for "Their feet are swift to shed blood; ruin and misery are in their paths, and the way of peace they have not known;  there is no fear of God before their eyes" (Romans 3:16-19).  Of course dogs turn into wolves in certain circumstances;  that is what at heart they really are.  Reinhold Niebuhr was fond of saying that "Original sin is the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith." An hour with the evening news shows how ubiquitous sin is in personal and corporate manifestations.  And an hour of silence with my own conscience quickly implicates my own acts and motives in these larger systems. 

But it is precisely on this universality of sin that the apostle Paul bases the universality of God's grace in Christ:  "Since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, they are now justified by God's grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus" (Romans 3:23-24). Part of the reason sin is such a taboo topic among progressive Christians is because for many churches the focus has been on the sin, it's guilt, and a pervasive undermining of the wonder of the image of God in people, instead of on the grace of God.  But that is having our attention snagged backwards, at the problem, rather than forward, towards God's solution.  For God's grace isn't just a matter of forgiving our sins, it is a matter of whole new possibilities in the way we live in relationship with God.

I don't hold the dog's natural behavior toward the errant buck against them, for I see a larger picture of their being than just that afternoon.  I love Scooter and Zack (yes, they have names).  When they are with me, they are no threat to the goats, they live their domestication, their obedience training, their connection to me.  Their relationship with me shapes their behavior, and eclipses their inner dingo.  By virtue of the relationship of love that I have with them (and at the risk of anthropomorphism, the love they have for me?), they are not wolves but pets.  Do they love me?  Well, I'm reminded of the joke:

Put your wife in the back of your pickup and drive around for an hour.  Now put your dog in the back of your pickup and drive around for an hour.  When you stop and let them out, who's happier to see you?

Scooter and Zack.  Got them to sit and stay!

The love of God transforms us as well.  It comes to us not because of what we do or don't do, but as a gift, something unexpected, something rooted in Christ God's self.  We are not limited by our sinful nature (whether it's "original" or "learned"), we are free to love God and our neighbor.  That is what we were originally created for -- sin is an alien overlay to human nature, not something essential to human nature.  And its universality simply means that God's grace is universal as well; "Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more" (Romans 5:20).

A final note of hope on the goat front:  The dam of the buck who died is bred to same sire as before.  Last year, she had two buck kids;  I hope she might have another.  If that happens, there might be a glimpse "behind the veil, behind the veil."

Working in the Night

If I say, "Surely the darkness shall cover me,
     and the light around me become night,"
Even the darkness is not dark to You;
     The night is as bright as the day,
           for darkness is as light to You.  (Psalm 139:11-12)

Some years ago, we installed a closed-circuit camera to the barn.  It runs to the unused TV antenna input to the TV, and we can put on the "Goat Channel" to keep tabs on what is happening in the stalls.  This is immensely convenient, for no longer do we have to put on boots and jacket at 3:00 a.m. to go check a close-up doe, only to come back to bed saying, "Nothing happening out there."  And other times, as occured a couple weeks ago, I was working inside, talking on the phone with a parishioner, and keeping a left eye on a doe.  Suddenly she lay down hard and started pushing, phone in hand I ran out to find she'd shot out a gorgeous kid.  After explaining what was happenning and hanging up, I was right there when kid #2 started coming, with an atypical presentation, which I promptly pulled.  We have saved several kids by being alerted to trouble via the ubiquitous TV view of the barn.

At night, when the 110 channels of Dish TV have nothing worth watching (!), the Goat Channel can be positively mesmerizing.  You might think that it would be a placid scene of does chewing their cud, with their kids tucked up next to them, sleeping the night away,  Quite the contrary!  All night long, goats are coming indoors and going outdoors, kids are running and playing, and does chase each other out of prime bedding spots under the heat lamps. If the night is calm and the moon is bright, whole families will wander outside to poke around the feeder for a three a.m. snack.  Kids play "king of the mountain," jumping up on their mom's back, daring their siblings to push them off.  Rarely can you watch more than a few minutes without animals moving around.  It's hard to snooze on the couch with the Goat Cam going, for something interesting is always going on.  Night is not a time of still and quiet.  This picture is from 1:30 a.m., and taken not long after the picture above.

Those of us who live "regular" "day" jobs are often unaware of the vast numbers of people whose primary work comes in the night.  Someone once told me that ministry was a "Second Shift" job, for you had to be able to be available at the hours other people were off work.  In that community, assembly lines ran 24/7, so someone was always getting up, working, socializing, or hitting the sack, quite irrespective of the place the sun or moon might be in the sky.  It was always someone's Friday night, and somebody else's Monday morning.  Yet those nocturnal people are usually invisible to the church, which continues to focus on Sunday mornings and weekday evenings for the lion's share of worship, education, fellowship, and decision making.

My help comes from the Lord,
       who made heaven and earth.
 God will not let your foot be moved;
      The Refuge who keeps you will not slumber.
The Savior who keeps Israel
      will neither slumber nor sleep.
 The Lord is your keeper;
      the Lord is your shade at your right hand.
 The sun shall not strike you by day,
      nor the moon by night.  (Psalm 121:2-6)

Many years ago, for a Lenten discipline, I attended the Evening Prayer service at my local Episcopal church.  A small group of elderly ladies, young people from the neighborhood, and Father Ostertag met each day at 5:00 for the brief liturgy.  Coming from an evangelical background, my idea of high liturgy was lighting candles to hymns on Christmas eve, so entering into this service was a very different experience.  I found that the prayers, though predictable, certainly did not amount to the "vain repetition" and "empty ritual" I had been warned about.  Rather, they percolated deep into my subconscious over those weeks, and I have been able to call on them in crises when my own spontaneous praying was overwhelmed.  Among the prayers is a collect that spoke to the busyness, activity, turmoil and tragedy that goes unseen each night:

Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep.  Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love's sake.  Amen

(Book of Common Prayer, Evening Prayer II, p. 124.)

My buzzing barn of kids sleeping and leaping reminds me to pray for all those who are awake deep in the night.  May you not have any 3:00 a.m. kiddings this season!  And when you do, know you do not toil alone.

Dramatic Reading of Creator Sophia/Logos

This is a liturgical reading that my colleague the Rev. Sharon Benton and I did for Christmas 2A, when the gospel was John 1 and the OT and Apocrypha readings were a variety of Wisdom/Sophia texts.  This was inspired by a dramatic reading at the Reverend Mommy blog, which blended John 1 and Genesis 1, but we reworked it significantly to include the Sophia material.  I've been favorably impressed with the potential of a Sophia Christology for many years, even wrote a paper on it while in seminary (1989).  This reading juxtaposes much of the scriptural raw material, and I invite you to enjoy it as a narrative window into a much larger theological discussion.

A dramatic reading of Creation honoring Logos/Sophia/Christ

(Sharon): In the beginning God (beat)

(Mark): In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

(Sharon):  Ages ago I, Sophia Wisdom, was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth.

Unison : In the beginning

(Sharon): (no pause) God created

Unison : the heavens and the earth.

(Mark):  Christ is the Sophia and power of God.

(Sharon):  Sophia is a breath of the power of God, a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty.

(Mark): Through the Word all things were made; without whom nothing was made that has been made.

(Sharon)  I, Sophia, came forth from the mouth of the Most High, and covered the earth like a mist.  Alone I compassed the vault of heaven, and traversed the depths of the abyss.

(Mark): Now the earth was formless and empty,

(Sharon): When God established the heavens, I was there. When God drew a circle on the face of the deep, when God marked out the foundations of the earth, I was there.

(Mark): For in Christ all things in heaven and on earth, things visible and invisible, all things have been created through him and for him.

(Sharon):  Then was I beside God, like a master worker, daily God’s delight, rejoicing together always.

(Mark): Darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, "Let there be light," and there was

(Unison): light.

(Mark): In him was life, and that life was the light (beat)

(Sharon): light

(Mark): of humanity.

(Sharon): God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the

(Unison): (staggered/irregular) darkness.

(Mark): The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.

(Sharon):  Wisdom is radiant and unfading, she is easily discerned by those who love her, and is found by those who seek her.

(Mark): God called the light "day," and the darkness God called “night.”

(Sharon):  And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

(Unison):  And God saw that it was good.

(Mark): And a second day, making land and sea, was good.

(Sharon):  The third day, spreading forth vegetation, was good.

(Mark):  The fourth day, honoring the sun and moon as God’s creations, was good. 

(Sharon):  And the fifth day, teeming with fish, birds and animals, was good.

(Mark): Then God said, "Let us make human beings in our image, in our likeness.”

(Sharon):  Sophia is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God and an image of God’s goodness.

(Mark):  Christ is the image of the invisible God

(Sharon):  In every generation she passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God, for God loves nothing so much as the person who lives with Wisdom, yes, great Sophia.

(Mark):  So God created humans in God’s own image, in the image of God they were created; male and female they were created.

 (Sharon):  I rejoiced with God always, rejoicing in the inhabited world, and delighting in the human race.

(Mark): God saw all that had been made, and it was very good.

(Unison): Very good!

(Sharon):  Then the Creator of all things gave me a command, and chose a tent for me:  “My Sophia,  make your dwelling in Jacob, and in Israel receive your inheritance.”  So I took root in an honored people, in the portion of the Lord, our heritage.

(Mark): The Word became flesh and made camp among us.

(Sharon):  And Mary brought forth her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.

(Mark):  And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature, and it divine and human favor.

(Sharon):  I grew tall like a cedar in Lebanon, like a cypress on the heights of Hermon.  Like the vine I bud forth delight, and my blossoms become abundant and glorious fruit.

(Mark):  I am the true vine, and you are the branches. Those who abide in me bear much fruit.

(Sharon):  You, that are simple, turn in here!  Come, eat of my bread, and drink of the wine I have mixed!

(Mark): This is my body… this is my blood.

(Sharon):  Happy is the one who listens to me, watching daily at my gates.  For whoever finds me finds life, and obtains favor from the Lord!

(Mark):  We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

(Sharon):  She is more beautiful than the sun, and excels every constellation of the stars.

(Mark):  No one has ever seen God.  It is God, the only begotten

(Sharon): Sophia, who is close to the Most High’s heart

(Mark):  The Word, who is close to the Father’s heart

(Sharon): Jesus Christ, who has made God known.

(Unison):  In the beginning.

(Texts from Gen. 1, Prov. 8, Wisdom of Solomon 7, Sirach 24, John 1, John 15 and I Cor. 1, Col. 1)

Grace to the weak kid, even at midnight

Over the past two days, we have had a veritible storm of kids born.  At one point yesterday, I was working with a couple of newborn kids, to get them up and onto their dams udder, and at the same time watching another doe going into labor a hundred feet away.  Most of them have done fine.

But one extra small doeling had gotten away from its mom at birth, wasn't under its heatlamp, and was chilled.  Not terribly, and a half hour with the blow dryer, and she was warm enough to wake up, and after a lot of prodding, even ate a bit.  I thought all was well, but then when I went out this morning, repeat performance:  the kid was in the middle of its stall, flat on the cold ground.  I grabbed it, and at first thought it was dead, it was stiff and cold. But I heard a faint flutter of life inside!  So hurried it into the house, put it in a sink of warm water, and massaged its tiny limbs and rubbed it all over.  Eventually, it came around, and after some time wrapped in a towel on a heat register, we took it back out to its dam.  She still claimed it, but the kid was pretty dumb... wouldn't latch onto the teat, and when it did, couldn't seem to figure out how to get the end of it flowing.  After a long time, we finally got some milk into her.

But late in the day, she was acting chilled again, sleepy and wouldn't stand to nurse.  So back into the house, on the heat register for a while to rewarm.  Then back to the barn, and another long struggle to get it to eat anything.  About this time, I milked the mom a bit, figuring we might have to bottle feed her.  Took her back into the house to the heat register and then Ivan took it into the bed with him because it still wasn't acting like it was warming up.  It did rewarm, and then another jaunt to the barn to its mom -- and she finally ate pretty well.  Now she's back inside, on a towel in the bathroom, on a heat register.

  Ivan with chilled doe

So much work for one little doeling!  A commercial operation would have lost her by now; we probably would have if the weather had been like last week's below zero slam.  And so much attention lavished on the one extra small kid out of the whole bunch born in the last couple of days.  Which seems to me to be the way God works:

26 Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. ²⁷But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; ²⁸God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are... (I Cor. 1:26-28)

If we can pour forth attention on the tiny, weak doeling that may well not survive the next day, how much more does God pour attention on us?  And if this is the way God works, then oughtn't we pay attention to those people around us who are weak, who are vulnerable, and who we might be able to help?