Wild Iris

"Chew your cud, dear," Iris' mother said.
Iris pretended not to hear her.  It wasn't difficult, the pretending.  Her mind was elsewhere.
"And stop moving around so much.  Your trampling perfectly good grass."
Iris and her Family had been trampling this particular grass for three days now.  This grass didn't taste any different than the grass they had trampled before and she was reasonably sure it going to be pretty much the same when it came time to trample some more.

Iris made a few token chews and then trampled a bit more.  She couldn't seem to stand still these days.  It wasn't that she wasn't interested in chewing her cud--or any of the other Four Activities that had kept buffalo busy for thousands of years--she just found herself interested in something else.  Something she couldn't find herself willing to share with her fellow buffalo.  Something...forbidden.
Iris was curious.

Now Iris knew nothing about the human saying that "curiosity killed the cat", but she wouldn't have been surprised by it.  The buffalo had a similar saying: "You don't have to be the least curious buffalo, you just have to be less curious than the one trampling next to you."  Curiosity just wasn't prized among Iris' people.  The proper response to curious things was to do the third of the Activities: Running for Your Life.  Rustling in the leaves meant there was a lion over there.  Watching small creatures under your feet meant you weren't looking for lions.  What was over the next hill?  Probably a lion. 

 
Fear was the proper attitude for any self-respecting Buffalo.  Fear was what had made the Buffalo strong, kept them going, protected them.  Iris didn't have a healthy respect for fear.  And because of that, she found herself curious. But curiosity is a curious emotion.  It's something one feels, but the feeling shows a humility of knowledge.  A desire to know more than one already does.  Fear, the normal state of buffalo-ness, is also something one feels.  But there's no desire to know more.  There is just the desire to run.  (Or, for some species, to fight.  But not Buffalo.)  The only proper response to fear is Running For Your Life.  Iris didn't want to Run.  She was tired of running.  She wanted to Know.

And so it came to be that when Iris and her Herd crested the next hill, they realized that this wasn't just another hill, it was the Last Hill.  Specifically, the Last Hill of the Great Expanse that marked the boundary between the Places to Chew Cud and the Place to Avoid at All Costs.  The Place to Avoid At All Costs was (humanly speaking for the reader's sake) a town.  Just a town.  Full of humans who thought buffalo where nice to look while they drank their coffee.  Maybe sometimes Awe-inspiring.  Maybe sometimes even a kind of almost spiritually reverence-inducing totem.  But usually more of something they appreciated seeing out their windows, at least until the next sub-division was built and they no longer had the view.  Humans are silly that way.

But Humans were anything but scenery for Iris.  She wanted to know more.  What did they do in those caves they lived in?  Why where they always looking out the holes at them?  What were they drinking?  Always drinking?

And so Iris did the unthinkable.  The unthinkable is always something you do without thinking because if you thought about it you wouldn't have done it.  Without thinking, Iris asked a Question.  "What are they doing in those caves?" she asked.  Out loud.  The already pretty quiet Herd became even more silent.  The chewing stopped, the grunting ceased.  If anything could have been heard at all, it was the grass sighing relief as the Trampling paused.  "What do you mean?", her mother replied.  "I mean, why do they sit there, drinking that liquid and moving their mouths?  Do they chew cud?  Are they like us?".  This clarification, despite its thoroughness, was met with absolute silence.  These were thoughts no one had ever contemplated before.  These were thoughts that no buffalo had ever wondered (a word nearly always followed with a shudder).  And there is only one response to wonder.  FEAR.

No one would ever know which buffalo it was that make the first lunge forward.  It's a pointless question anyway.  They all knew what to do and they all did exactly what every buffalo always does when faced with the Unknown.  They Ran For Their Lives.  Everyone.  All at once.  Humans call it a Stampede.  But this is a crude way of seeing it.  As if the buffalo had lost control.  As if they were participating mindless group-think.  For a buffalo, there was no thinking except for group-think.  So group-think can't be bad, because there is no other way of thinking.  As a group, they thought about how terrifying it was that humans drank liquids seemingly (and therefore: factually) non-stop.  They thought about all the water in the whole world would one day pass into and through them.  They thought about how the Place to Avoid At All Costs was one hill closer than it was the last time they grazed this area.  They thought...well, the thinking ended there because that one buffalo lunged.  And they were off.

Normally, Buffalo all Run For Their Lives in the same direction.  That's kind of why it works so well.  But Iris, of course, was at the moment...curious.   So when she Ran, she broke from the group and ran straight down the hill.  Away from her family, away from everything she had ever known and directly towards the liquid drinking and occasionally staring humans.  Directly for their cave.

No one would notice Iris was going the wrong direction  Running for Your Life was not a time for any kind of thinking whatsoever.  Even Iris didn't realize she had somehow ran the wrong direction.  But once that direction had been chosen, there was not much one could do.  Iris was still a buffalo after all.  She was curious, yes, but she was also Running for Her Life.  And so she ran.  And ran.  And ran.  At least until she reached the wall of the cave.

At some point she realized that things were not going as they usually did.  Usually Running for One's Life just deposited one in a safer place.  Tired, yes, but not dead.  And definitely not in front of a large (what do you even call this thing?  A wall?  Sure, why not.  We're learning all sorts of new things today) ... wall.  Because buffalo are not designed for quick turns, she just kept running, right for the wall.  Until she actually met the wall.  At full speed.  Head on.

One can probably imagine the sound of the crash that ensued.  The sound of a buffalo the size of a small car running full speed into the wall of a coffee shop.  It was loud.  But when the dust had settled and everyone had a chance to come to terms with what had happened, Iris found herself looking directly into the "cave" she had wondered about.  But now she could do more than see it from a distance.  She could see it up close.  There were the humans with their mugs full of some liquid that smelled amazing.  There were sounds they were making as they drank, almost musical in their back-and-forth sing-song melody.  Iris no longer felt fear.  She was even more than curious.  She was fascinated.  

For their parts, the humans were surprisingly cavalier about the whole thing.  A lifetime of CGI wonders had made them somewhat numb to things like this--even to what should have been the shocking fact that a buffalo had just run into the side of their coffee shop and rammed her head right through.  But its maybe not that surprising as the the coffee was quite good and the conversations they were having were even more attention-grabbing. After a few moments of surprise on the amount of plaster suddenly on the floor, they noted the always-changing decor of the shop and continued their sipping, debating and catching up.

For her part, Iris found herself a bit in shock.  She was tired from Running.  She still had cud in her mouth.  But what she heard was something she had never heard before.  The susurration of human conversation.  The back and forth of ideas.  Jokes.  Stories.  Life.  Oh, and coffee.  She had never smelled coffee before, but now that she had she would never want to not smell it.  Iris realized suddenly that...she was home.  This was the perfect place for a curious buffalo.  Safely on the other side of the wall, but just close enough to the humans to satisfy her curiosity.  She finally found a place to satisfy her curiosity while not being afraid.  Iris was still a buffalo.  But she had found something most buffalo (and more humans for that matter) look for their entire lives.  The place between curiosity and fear.  The place one can want to know without being afraid to know.  Iris, standing outside a coffee shop with her head poking through a hole in the wall (as ridiculous as that sounds) was finally...home.

One day, listening to a show on NPR, I learned of a fascinating study someone had done on how we make moral choices on a biological level.  They had done scans of the brain while asking morally ambiguous questions.  What they discovered was that it appeared the choice to choose one option over another wasn't a centrally located buzz of activity, but rather several locations battling it out for the correct choice. For instance, one zone would win over another in the choice between saving five people versus one.  But that same zone would lose the battle if that one person was your child.  It was as if every choice being made was a debate of options, even at the most fundamental level.  The conclusion was that there is no centrally located "judge" in our brains that does the choosing.  In fact, the more they study the brain, the more it seems like a collection of partial persons who somehow work together to form a single person greater than all of them.  We are Legion.

And as these things usually do, I began to wonder what this means and how it fits with what I believe about God.  And it was especially challenging this time because this idea of decentralized organization has shown itself to be amazingly efficient in all sorts of systems.  Planetary environments, biological bodies, economics, governments, the list goes on and on.  It has even been proposed that one argument against the existence of God is the simple fact that things left to themselves without management naturally seem to organize themselves in some fashion!  Even a pot of boiling water forms hexagonal columns of circulation.  Liquid hexagons!

But if God is the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, if he is the mover and Shaker of all things, why is our universe, even ourselves, arranged in such a way that precludes the necessity of Divine central control?  How is God's "eternal power" and "Divine nature" clearly seen through what had been made?

You know that feeling you get when you pull out yet another loop of tangled headphone wires and suddenly the whole knot comes lose, the wires falling straight and the loops opening up?  The separate voices in my head clamoring for the answer had finally reached a consensus.  And here is the conclusion they came to.

God's eternal power and his divine nature are summed up in his divine love.  His selfless, gracious, merciful love.  God himself is the source of all being and holds the universe together in his hand.  And yet, he seems to have done everything possible to create a universe and people that operate apart from him.  We can explain the things of nature without mentioning God.  We can make decisions for ourselves, for better or worse, without God.  In fact, unless you get down to the very basic philosophical questions about the source of our existence, God doesn't seem to be necessary. 

What kind of person writes himself out of the story?  A selflessly loving person, that's who.  Only selfless love is capable of creating another being capable of selflessly loving it back.  And a group of people, selflessly loving each other doesn't require a centralized organizer of that love.  As a young twiterpated couple doesn't need one of them to be superior to the other, as a brain doesn't need one lobe superior to the other, as a government doesn't need one branch superior to another, when selfless love is the foundation of all things, they organize themselves into something greater than themselves.  This is the Glory of God. 

In the end we realize that he didn't write himself out of the story after all.  As it happens, he is the story.  For he is Love.

Prescription Strength

The stories of my faith tell of many men and women who stood before the "face of God". Not just in front of Jesus, who, being truly human would normally just appear human, but before the Father himself, maybe even the entire trinity. Elijah, Moses, the disciples to whom Jesus revealed his true self during the transfiguration, all of these stood face to face with God himself. And we often think that if we could have such an experience, then maybe our faith wouldn't be so hard. It would be so much easier to believe in God if he were standing (or floating or whatever) right there, right?
This is a challenging time in my life. After losing my job and my home at the same time, my family and I have moved into the home of a gracious and generous family in our church. The house is plenty big enough for both of our families--would we choose to use the back door instead of the front we would never even have to see them. But we do use the front door and for various other reasons (for instance we do not have an oven of our own or even all of our dishes), we share both of our spaces to a limited extent.
For the most part, this setup is working just fine. But one of the main areas of tension always brewing just under the surface is over cleanliness. Now, I have never thought of my family as being dirty. We have four small children and tend to leave a lot of clutter around, we never take the time to organize toys that are just going to be dumped out and stirred up again the next day and often just getting out the door is much more important to us than making sure the last of the peanut butter and jelly is removed from the table (or couch or wherever it was smeared). Our host family, on the other hand is amazingly tidy and clean. It is almost to the point where there is rarely any evidence that they live upstairs at all if they are not actually present. They make dinner without a mess. They eat dinner without a mess. They free play all over the house without a mess. They too have small children. They are never messy. I have decided to just leave the dirt on my two year old's face just so people will recognize him because it is rarely not there. Their children sometimes have frizzy hair.
I am continually in awe of this. And, because in my new life situation I am now the stay-at-home parent, I am seriously intimidated. The other day, my host found a roach in their area of the house. The same plea was repeated. "Please please watch the food and be careful". Now I know that roaches are just a fact of life and do not necessarily indicate filth. Honestly I don't even know if it was a roach at all (as an outdoor education instructor for fifteen years, you must earn a certain level of respect from me before I believe you saw anything in particular beyond the standard pets). But the shame hit me hard. I remembered that they had walked through our area earlier that day as I napped on the couch, the table littered with the sticky remains of the PB&J my children had just slaughtered and consumed. How lazy and disgusting must I have appeared?
It gets worse though. Because in my attempt to relieve my shame, I begin thinking of all the ways our family is in fact superior to theirs. And then I realized that not only am I a slob, but I am also a judgemental, arrogant (and let's be honest a little lazy) slob. And I just want to crawl into a hole.
Which brings me back to my original (and somewhat aprupt) introduction. If this is how I feel in the presence of someone who clearly has (at least part of) their life together far more than me, how would I feel before the face of God, the creator of said life? Those stories also speak of men falling down on their faces in the dirt, begging God to go away. People who got too close to him, too familiar, and would just drop dead. How can we not feel some level of fear before a God who is so Good, so Loving, we cannot stand it?
Maybe it is a great mercy that God hides himself from us. That we only experience him in measured doses: the kindness of a stranger or even worse, a friend; the beauty of a sunrise; the giggle of a little girl. I can barely stand it when my daughter smiles at me. My heart would surely explode were I to see the smile of God.
I have spent much of my life seeking after God. Desiring to know him more and more fully. But I have not spent nearly enough time working on my own self, practicing the kinds of things that would make me slightly less ashamed to stand before him. I know he loves me. But I think I am becoming more thankful that he reveals that love in measured doses. I do not think I could handle much more than I am getting right now. There is just too much peanut butter smeared into my beard.