Hunters & Gatherers

My brother came to visit last week, to hunt for deer on our little parcel of Virginia.  He's a skilled and experienced hunter who relies on the deer season to both stretch his grocery dollar and to satisfy his taste for venison.  Due to a series of unfortunate circumstances, he had only gotten one deer while hunting back home in Pennsylvania. While I welcomed his visit it made me rather anxious, worrying that the deer I saw so frequently would be elsewhere while my brother was here.  I didn't want him to go home empty handed after 150 miles of driving!

Although he saw many deer, he'd still had no success by the beginning of the last evening's hunt.  Then finally, at dark, I heard him return to the house and with apprehension went to see how things had gone.... He got one! Hooray!  It wasn't the giant deer he'd seen within the first moments of his first day's hunting, and it was only one deer, but it was a respectably-sized creature, a buck, and as my brother said to me, it was "the one I was supposed to have."   Then followed the gutting, and the dragging, and the cutting and packing into the cooler of the venison.  It was all quite exciting, and everyone was happy - and relieved!

My brother's comment about this deer being the one he was supposed to have, got me to thinking about God's providence.  As I said, my brother is a good hunter, and that's not just my sisterly bias.  All who know him would say the same.  And yet, he still had only one deer to his credit before his visit.  Despite the hours and days spent hunting, carefully, patiently waiting and watching, still he had little success. What was up with that?

Well, what's up is that God gives us what we're supposed to have.  Those who hunt and gather from nature, I think, are more tuned in to the truth that all things come from God.  All the hunting experience and skill in the world is not going to guarantee a kill, nor will foolish carelessness ensure that you'll never bring home meat.  God provides.  Skill and experience make the whole thing easier, but ultimately its God's providence that allows hunters to bring home the venison.

The fact of God's providence is more apparent to hunters than to herders, and to foragers than to farmers.  Because they are involved in so many more parts of the process - feeding and breeding and tending their animals - herders are more likely to think that the success of their livestock is merely the natural result of their good husbandry.  Similarly, farmers who plant and weed and water a field to grow a crop are more likely than foragers (who roam the woods and fields gathering wild plants) to see a bountiful harvest as nothing more than than the fruit of their hard work.

And when we step back even farther in the process and consider the majority of us, who's only regular experience with  "hunting and gathering" is in the retail setting of grocery or department store, it's even easier to see our bounty as nothing more than the natural and inevitable result of our own skill and hard work.

We work at jobs and earn money.  We take our money to the store and buy what we want.  Unless you are foolish enough to be shopping for milk and toilet paper on the eve of Snow-mageddon, you ARE going to find what you set out to buy.  Americans in general have plenty of money, and the county I live in (Loudoun, VA) has the dubious honor of being one of the wealthiest counties in the nation.  We have plenty of money and more than enough stuff to buy with it.

This way of life makes it easy to forget that everything we have has come to us as a gift of God's grace.

"All things come of Thee, and of Thine own have we given Thee." (KJV, 1 Chronicles, 29:14b)
"Everything comes from You, and we have given You only what comes from Your hand." (NIV) 

If you think about it, though, everything truly comes from God.  He knit us together in our mother's womb with our various traits and tendencies.  He placed us in a family with particular people to train and nurture us. God placed skills and talents in each of us, and gave us opportunities to use and develop them.  Both the corporate executive and the backwoods hunter are equally beholden to God for their ability to make a living.

I invite you to spend 24 hours intentionally looking at your life with the eyes of a humble hunter or a grateful gatherer.  Notice all the things you take for granted, as the fruit of your labors, and think back through the steps that gave you the ability or opportunity to have those things in the first place.  Thank God for the great bounty that He, not you, has provided.

Fire and Ash

On sunny days at certain seasons, rays of sunlight will pass through the stained glass windows behind the altar of St. Peter's Church and land in columns of color on the wall during the worship service.  I love gazing at the stripes of gemstone colors - something beautiful on which to fix my eyes while singing or listening or praying.

Last week the effect was particularly striking, and one patch of color gathered up the reds and cast upon the wall  a slender tongue of flame some three feet tall.  It was stunningly beautiful, and my first thought was of the tongues of flame at Pentecost.  "They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them." (Acts 2:3)  I kept hoping that the priest or an acolyte or somebody would walk between me and that tongue of flame, so that it would look like fire had come to rest on them.  Alas, I was disappointed, and after 10 or 15 minutes the position of the sun changed and the fire was gone except in memory.

But it has proved a potent memory, one I keep going back to, perhaps because Ash Wednesday is nearly upon us.  In the Ash Wednesday liturgy, we are reminded that we are formed from dust, and ashes are marked on the forehead with the words, "remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return."  The contrast of fire and ash is so very rich...

The creation story in Genesis tells how God created Adam from the dust of the earth.  God formed Adam, but he was not alive until God breathed into him the spark of life.  What's the different between "ash" and "Adam?" The difference is the presence of "Life" - God's holy fire, the spark the makes the difference between a dead sculpture and a living human being.

Ordinary fire consumes.  Fuel is required to maintain the blaze, and when the fuel runs out, the fire goes out, leaving nothing but charred, dead ash.  God's fire, however, burns without consuming, without destroying, like the time when God appeared to Moses in a burning bush.  "There the angel of the LORD appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up." (Exodus 3:2)

Our passions are often described as fire, and its in our passions that the difference between natural fire and God's Holy fire is, I think, most evident.  Natural passions consume us.  They must be fed or they die, burning us up (and burning us out) in the process!  How many lives have been ruined trying to maintain a passion at all costs?   Charlie Sheen is in the headlines now for the flaming wreck he's made of his life by pursuing his various "passions."  But how many others have burned themselves up away from the public eye, pursuing more "noble" passions of career, children, hobby, wealth, beauty, health, and on and on and on.

The passions God gives us - the ones that are focused on God, motivated by God's love of us, fueled by awe of Him - those passions will set us ablaze without being consumed.  Much like Jesus at the Transfiguration, God's light will shine forth from us like spiritual fire, giving light and life to those around us.  And not a hair on our heads will be so much as singed in the process!  

What passions do you burn with?  Do they consume you, using you up, leaving a pile of dead ashes?  Or do they fill you with the life of God, burning but no consumed, fueled by God's powerful love?  Lent is a great time to take a look at your life and your passions, see what gives light and life, and what merely consumes, and consider whether changes are in order.

"I invite you, therefore, ... to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God's holy Word."  (BCP, p. 265)