Unwelcome Woodland Creatures

             The dogs lost their minds last night around midnight.  Someone was on our deck.  The three of us ran to the big window and I flipped on the light.  Raccoons.  They stared back like customers shocked at such poor service.  In daylight my deck looks like some roadhouse at closing time:   my hummingbird feeders like empties in the lot, red glass shards everywhere, and flowers ripped out of pots.

             I survey the damage and think unkind thoughts toward certain of God’s creatures, then turn to this morning’s reading from Father Gregory Boyle, known as “G” to those he serves: 
​

We are our healthiest when we are most situated in awe, 
and our least healthy when we engage in judgment.  
Judgment creates the distance that moves us away from each other.  
Judgment keeps us in the competitive game and is always self-aggrandizing.
Standing at the margins with the broken reminds us not of our own superiority
but of our own brokenness. . . . 
The embrace of our own suffering helps us to land on a spiritual intimacy
​with ourselves and others. 
For if we don’t welcome our wounds, we will be tempted to despise the wounded. 

             A raccoon can shimmy headfirst down a twenty-foot deck post in utter darkness.  With his back legs he dangles from a wire to drink sugar water from a feeder clutched like a beer bottle in his tiny fists.  The gymnastics needed to remove the feeder from the wire to smash it on the deck floor are equally impressive.

             While all that raccoon awesomeness doesn’t make me like them any better, it does prompt a wisp of self-awareness.  I’ve chosen a house in the woods and a style of hospitality that might qualify as xenophobic.  After all, I only welcome those whose ways contribute to the particular house in the woods vibe I’m after.  So, hummingbirds and lightning bugs are welcome.  So are frogs, turtles and turkeys.  Deer can come so long as they only eat in the woods or stand stately on my lawn.  Snakes are not invited but will not be turned away, as snakes are never noisy, messy, or destructive.  Besides, snakes lend a certain edginess to the vibe.

             Raccoons and chipmunks are entirely unwelcome for reasons heretofore described.  Chipmunks are simply raccoons in miniature.  Foxes and hawks attack my chickens, so they aren’t received, nor skunks and most opossums, though a mother opossum with a backpack full of babies once crossed my yard and I smiled at the awesome engineering.  Mosquitos, deer ticks, stink bugs, tomato hornworms, and a host of other insects too numerous to name fill my list of undesirables.  They just don’t work for me.

             While he might not preclude the exercise, Father G did not have my relationship to woodland creatures in mind in writing his devotion.  He’s inviting me to hear Jesus’ call to love and be loved among my human neighbors, especially those we think need what we already have:  the poor, the refugee, the mentally ill.  He invites me to lay down the false security of walls that protect nothing really, nothing but the pretense of our own superiority.  We are just as broken.  We are just as wounded.  And we have a world to gain by mustering the awe necessary to cross the oh-so-shallow riverbed that separates brothers and sisters too long kept apart by fear.

             Please do pray for those who suffer right now from the abuse of separation, each of us doing what we can to love the ones whose paths we cross.

~ peace & prayers, 
pastor annette

* raccoon photo credit: Patrick Elting, Fort Worth, Texas nationalgeographic.com  

*For those of you asking for the partial list of companies currently profiteering from the building and maintenance of the migrant detention camps that I mentioned on Sunday, you can find it here: https://wearyourvoicemag.com/news-politics/companies-profit-migrants-detention?fbclid=IwAR0xrJhnStzx1xzgRCTPEOa3g3blzq08GvJ3f9z_a9xJv3_gKcq5iJ-w_us