In the morning, Fate loves to hide behind the Skid Barn and ambush Red as he does his very wide outruns. Red is torn between practicality and duty. He will never pause or alter his outruns for anyone or any thing. But I notice he is going wider, hugging the fence as he comes tearing around the corner of the pasture, it gives him more room to maneuver around Fate.
But she has him, she knows where he will be, and she rushes out and races alongside of him as he finishes the outrun. Fate manages to find joy in every moment of her life. She is great fun to be around, and Red is the best straight man since Bud Abbott.
Zelda is one tough sheep. She has knocked me down several times, led breakouts out of the pasture, trampled Red. Now, she terrorizes Fate, who is not really into biting rebellious sheep on the nose, she would rather run than fight. This morning, Fate was trying to visit Maria, who was visiting with the sheep at the feeder and chatting with them, as she does.
Zelda charged her and Fate backed up quickly, approached Maria from the other side. And she sat right behind Maria, where she knew she was safe. She doesn’t mess with Zelda, and that’s fair. I don’t either. She and Red have a very respectful true. He doesn’t put her hard, she obeys orders in her own time.
Fate doesn’t fight, but she doesn’t quit either. Two strong women in their own way. But Fate is not headed for blue ribbons at any trial. She’s a winner to us, though, we love her dearly.
One of the many things I love about my good life is that I often come across scenes like this. I have learned to always have my camera with me, I regret it every time I don’t. At our first farm, we lost so many chickens to hawks and foxes and disease we stopped naming them and made an effort not to get to know them.
On impulse, Maria put some crackers in her hand and went out to hand-feed the hens. One by one (this is the first time she’s done that), Minnie the barn cat and the hens gathered around her, and it became an exercise in patience and trust, a form of active listening
The Red Hen was the first to take the crumbs out of her hand, then the gray hen. The white hen couldn’t bring herself to do it. Maria has a powerful connection with animals, I feel that as well. Learning how to trust and communicate with them is a never-ending joy and process for us. It is grounding, calming, healing and affirming. I’m always touched at how much some animals want and need human attention. And how little of it other animals need. Minnie thinks she is a chicken, I think.
For some time now, we’ve been aware of another hiker in the woods where we walk. We’ve seen bear feces, filled with seeds, and sometimes the dogs circle in a kind of crazed, excited way. They don’t pursue the smell too far. We’ve always thought they were smelling a bear.
Our neighbor Tom Wolski set up a video camera to get a photo of the bear, he knew he was around, he named him Fred. He is a big boy, bout 44 inches tall. Fred is known in our neighborhood, aside from his droppings, which we see on the paths and along the road, he is well known for raiding bird feeders and garbage cans around here, he is believed to have entered a chicken roosting pen down the road and eaten some of the chickens.
As we see from the scat, he loves seeds and berries. And he seems to eat a lot of them.
We know there are bears around here, but we have never seen one, they are rarely out walking around in the daylight, they are pretty brazen about knocking over garbage cans and feeders. They are not considered dangerous, they run away from people and dogs, unless you come between a mother and her cubs. They can move very quickly and fight if they need to.
Generally, if you bang a pan or shout at them, they lumber off. But we have never seen him.
This is one animal Maria will not chat with and adopt, I am sure.
From the scat he leaves behind, we know Fred likes the same paths we like. I am confident the border collies would not track or challenge him, that is not the nature of the breed. Red ignores all living things but sheep, and Fate runs when a cat hisses at her. She would not go near a bear. And we would not invade his privacy or bother him in any way. At least, not intentionally.
Tom sent me this photo tonight, I’m impressed. So far, he has left our feeders and garbage cans alone. Our chicken roost is pretty heavy and tight, but I imagine it is just a matter of time before we see Fred or get to know him better. Kind of exciting to have him for a neighbor..
Yesterday, I wrote about my own personal search to understand the phenomena of our politics, not from the raging tirades of the left or the right, but from as far away from them as I could get. When I try to understand something complicated and big, I try to imagine myself out in space, an alien hovering over the earth, looking down in wonder. How would I describe to my fellow aliens back home?
Sometimes you have to step very far back to see it. And I am trying to make sense out of it all, as you are.
It is in the air, I don’t wish to join the argument, I want to understand it for myself. Others can understand it for themselves. I would think people would be pleased not to argue, but in fact, many seem to hate not arguing and resent it. They no longer know any other way to talk.
In my piece yesterday, I wrote that if Jesus were alive in America today, watching the angry politicians and the billionaires and millionaires and lobbyists posturing and plotting, if he came to Washington and watched the the rape of working people and the pillaging of their communities in the name of the new economy, if he saw what corporations have done to the idea of work and security, he would have been lighting torches, calling on his disciples to pick up their swords and head for the Capitol and the architects of their betrayal.
This idea shocked a sometime friend of mine, who wrote on Facebook that there is nothing in scripture that would suggest or bolster the idea that Jesus would be doing any such of a thing as I described. How wrong, I thought, she was.
This brought me back, not only to the scripture, but to my dog-eared biographies of Jesus.
I cannot imagine a more political act than his shocking assault on the wealthy priests in the Temple of Jerusalem, an act of defiance and rebellion that was ultimately to cost him his life. And one that kept bring me back to our own temple, our capital city, a gathering of the new priests. When you think about it, the parallels come together.
“But whoever has this world’s goods, and sees his brother in need, and shuts up his heart from him, how does the love of God abide in him?,” asked Jesus. [John 3:17} And who, in our political debates, is asking that?
When he comes, does Jesus send the poor and the refugees away, ban them from safety, condemn them to suffering and death?
Would he blame the poor for being poor, the refugees for being displaced, the dispossessed for wanting a place to live? Would he urge us to hate more, fear more and torture more? What would he think of these new Christians, each one competing to wave his name around like a flag in the wind.
“Then Jesus went all about the cities and villages,” said Matthew, “teaching in their synagogues, preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every sickness and disease among the people.” [Matthew 9:35].
I imagine him this year on a political debate stage, listening to women being degraded, the poor ignored, the angry inflamed, the talk of carpet bombing, the turning away of refugees, the calls for more torture, more police, more anger and judgment, more war, the violence and hatred cheered on and praised. Wow, my analogy was even more accurate than I imagined it to be. The Romans have returned, not the messiah. We’re just missing the lions.
Out walking in the woods today, in the wind and sun, another epiphany came to me, it was like a vision, and it came to me, the understanding I was waiting for, the thing I was searching for. It was exciting, I rushed home to write it.
Jesus is so much larger than life, everyone can and does see in him what they want to see and wish to hear. We don’t really follow his example, we just use him in every way that we can. If he is the son of God, we will soon regret it. There is no faith that takes a Lord’s name in vain.
Jesus is perhaps the most exploited spiritual figure in the history of the world, invoked constantly by people who seem to know nothing about him or his values.
I am not a Christian, he is not a god to me, but a powerful inspiration, the ideal for humanity. He was on fire to make the world a better place, to give the poor and the oppressed hope, to heal the sick, to drive the moneylenders and lobbyists and glutinous politicians from their mountaintops.
So there is Christ. And then there is the antichrists, more than one.
In some Christian writings, Jesus the Christ (or Christian Messiah) will appear in his Second Coming to Earth to face the antichrist, who will be the greatest false messiah in Christianity. Just as Christ is the savior, protector of the poor and the idea model for humanity, the waiting antichrist will be the false messiah, a single figure of concentrated cruelty and greed. His message is the opposite of Jesus, he preaches hate and suspicion and fury.
In our time, the antichrist has, of course, been politicized, he has become another tool of the “left” and the “right,” the people who choose labels over thought and preaching over listening. If you Google “Anti-Christ,” you will see that the label people have each chosen their own demons, the two most popular antichrists on the Internet: George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. Since his very Jesus-like preaching for the poor, Pope Francis has come onto the Google list. Imagine, the rising new antichrist – I guess we need fresh ones – is Francis, the one most faithful to the message of Christ.
How dare he evoke the true Jesus.
That tells us so much about our time, and how much we seem to each need our own demons.
The name “antichrist” is only found in in the Bible once in, John 2:18 and 2 John 7. The Apostle John was the only writer in the Bible to use the term “antichrist.” In these verses, many different antichrists (false teachers) will appear between the time of Christ’s first and Second Coming, but there will be one great antichrist who will rise to power during the end times. He will deny that Jesus is the true Christ. He will be a liar and a deceiver.
When I read this, I think of H.L. Mencken, he wrote of the same man, he called him “Mob Man.” He is, he wrote, an ideal monster, governed by emotions.
“Whenever he is confronted by a choice between two ideas, the one sound and the other not, he chooses, almost infallibly, and by a sort of pathological compulsion, the one that is not. Behind all the great tyrants and butchers of history he has marched with loud hosannas, but his hand is eternally against those who seek to liberate the spirit of the race…In two thousand years he has moved an inch: from the sports of the arena to the lynching party…What is worth knowing he doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know; what he knows is not true.”
His heroes, added Mencken, are mostly scoundrels.
The antichrist, for me, is not a devil, but a political mindset, feeding off the rage and and disconnection and technological separation of people from one another that marks our time. This idea of the antichrist is not a single presidential candidate but a system, is a state of mind, a state of rage. The new antichrist is he child of lies and betrayals, of lobbyists and power-hungry billionaires, of angry e-mails and blogs.
When I think of Christ sitting and watching our political debates, I imagine him (I admit it, I am thinking of the screenplay) weeping at the blasphemous people who take his name in vain for greed and political power. Listening to the promises of carpet-bombing women and children, rounding up families of enemies, torture, exile and the persecution of the enemies they seem to need so badly. The leaders who are too cowardly to lead, they can only follow.
Is this, he might wonder, his promised Kingdom of God, the revolution he promised the sick and the poor, the refugees and the persecuted?
I think of the centurions marching out in the new America, tearing mothers from their children, sisters from brothers, deporting millions, storming into homes in the night, a great exodus of misery to top the flight of the Jews out of Egypt.
I think of women once again derided and dismissed, shamed for their looks, pitied, like rescue dogs and saved by their men once again.
The moral philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote that criminals teach us about the power of evil, but only the hypocrite is rotten to the core. In these angry preachings, there is for me the smell of rot. I don’t know if Jesus was a god or a man, but I am certain he was no hypocrite:
“Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.” [Matthew 23:28]
So maybe Jesus would turn them all into pillars of fire.
Would Jesus storm the Capitol, turn the debate stages into dust, find there the antichrists the Bible said he would face when he returned? It sort of fits.
I think so. I would be most pleased if he came back now to liberate the spirits of men and women and remind them of who he was and what he believed.
“And found in the temple those that sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the changers of money sitting: And when he had made a scourge of small cords, he drove them all out of the temple, and the sheep, and the oxen; and poured out the changers money, and overthrew the tables; And said unto them that sold doves, Take these things hence; make not my Father’s house an house of merchandise.”
Yes, for sure, I can see him in the Capitol, preaching that this was not a house of merchandise either.
And the lobbyists fled in terror, and the congressmen men and women hid the files of their SuperPacs, and hurriedly deleted the contents of their smart phones, and the billionaires rushed to find their corporate jets, and the poor and the refugees and the defamed and dismissed rushed to the Temple and set it on fire.
