He is the Way.
Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness;
You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures.He is the Truth.
Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety;
You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.He is the Life.
Love Him in the World of the Flesh;
And at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.
Yesterday I took my son to see the latest installment of the Harry Potter series on the big screen. First of all let me say that I thought the movie was terrific. It has been interesting to watch the story evolve and the young actors in the films grow into the maturity that their roles and the story requires. But, already, I digress.
One of the trailers before the film was for the new version of Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s tale, Where the Wild Things Are. I found myself fondly remembering the story I loved as a child and trying to tell J-bob that, as with most movies it seems, it was a book before it was a movie. The wildness and the wilderness of child like imagination sometimes needs prodding with the out of the ordinary and Sendak’s characters and creatures are definitely both.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve found that I don’t need to look quite as far for the ‘Wild Things’. Just in the past few weeks in Worcester, Massachusetts we’ve had a fox attack someone near downtown, wild turkeys lurking about the backyard, tales of bears in the cemeteries, young red-tail hawks perched outside our house and yesterday the tracking and capture of a moose IN the second largest city in New England.
These have served to remind me that following God can be a wild journey in the seemingly most mundane of places. Should we continue to cast our lot with the Jesus homeless Rabbi of Nazareth and his band of misfits (tax collectors, fishermen, women and others) we might expect to see strange things indeed, should we dare to pay attention.
That, it seems to me, is exactly the kind of lives we can expect to lead and the kinds of things we shouldn’t be surprised to see if Auden is right and Jesus is who we claim him to me. It seem, rather, that the real question is, “do we believe our own witness?”
I pray it is so for me, for you and for the communities of faith to which you belong.
There’s wild things out there, and that’s very good news!
