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Reflection for August 20, 2006

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Last Sunday's first reading invited us to enter the house of Lady Wisdom to savor her delicacies, which often take the shape of proverbs. Here are a few examples:

-Like snow in summer, honoring a fool is out of place.
-Dependence on a fickle person in time of trouble is like nursing an infected tooth.
-Like a moth in your clothing, sorrow eats away at your heart.
-Like clouds followed by no rain is the man who promises but doesn't deliver.
-Like a man who seizes a rabid dog is a man who meddles in a quarrel not his own.
-Like a glazed finish to a piece of pottery are smooth lips that conceal a wicked heart.
-A quarrelsome woman is like a persistent leak on a rainy day.

Of course this kind of instruction simply offers practical wisdom. But what people often miss in such proverbs - and what I want to stress - is their basic conviction that there's a radical relationship between us human beings and the world around us. Notice how each proverb draws a lesson from such ordinary things as glazed pottery, leaks, rabid dogs, moths, an infected tooth. They make of everything a mirror wherein you may learn things about yourself, avoid mistakes, get the most out of life. They illustrate your solidarity with your environment, which can serve you as a mentor.

We modern folk like to think we're independent of nature; it's ours to manipulate. There are even poets who write "A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose" to divert us from seeing a rose as anything else but a rose, inapplicable to you and me. But we have other poets who don't hesitate at all to say of their sweetheart "My love is like a red, red rose" the way I might sing of my spouse "You are my sunshine, my only sunshine." Is she sunshine? You could be picky and say no. But is she sunshine? Sure she is for she brightens my day, warms my heart, makes my world blossom; she's everything that sunshine is and in sunshine I find a revelation of her own nature. Nor do we hesitate to do a turn-about and impose our characteristics on nature and things. We speak of the legs of a table, the hands of a clock, the foot of a mountain, the eye of a needle, the sighing of the wind, the fury of a storm, the cunning of a fox - human qualities that suggest nature to be as personal as we. We create stories in which animals talk and even dress like us.

What I am trying to say is that, despite our tendency often to feel all alone in an alien universe, we do in fact declare by way of our proverbs, metaphors and similes, that we are intimately related to the sun and moon and roses and glazed pottery even as Jesus found in bread and wine images of himself. And if we can do this, do we not admit there's some underlying unity that binds both nature and human nature together - that we are one cosmic family? And so how can we ever feel despondent and lonely? How can we not delight in the fact that we all share a common origin, a common parentage in a Creator who unites and animates us all?

Mary Oliver says as much in her poem "Some Questions You Might Ask": Is the soul solid like iron? / Or is it tender and breakable, / like the wings of a moth . . .? / Who has it, and who doesn't? / I keep looking around me. / The face of the moose is as sad / as the face of Jesus . . . / One question leads to another . . . / Why should I have it, and not the anteater / who loves her children? / Why should I have it, and not the camel? / Come to think of it, what about the maple trees? / What about the blue iris? / What about all the little stones, sitting alone in the moonlight? / What about roses, and lemons, and their shining leaves? / What about the grass?

-- Geoff Wood