We gathered outside today, this small congregation of six squirrels, one rabbit, several birds, a tree frog or two, hundreds of insects and me. The squirrels were unruly - chasing one another from tree to tree; ruffling the leaves and scratching the bark; dangling perilously from dead branches; scrambling across the shed roof and up the playset slide; upsetting birds and sending loose yellow leaves to the ground; chattering all the while.
The rabbit came in late and zig-zag-hopped across the grass, pausing every few yards to sit still and give me a steely stare, his cotton-tail twitching. He gravitated to the stand of irises, dead and papery bruise-purple blooms still clinging. There used to be a white porcelain bunny figurine in the iris bed - wonder if he was looking for it, for the image of what once was. The ceramic piece had a broken ear, eventually succumbing completely to the elements and scraped into the rubbish bin. A hollow reflection of the real at best.
The music was provided by a chorus of cicadas, birds and frogs - the song rose and fell in waves from whisper to crescendo - an unrehearsed and untamed hallelujah. A liturgical dance sprang up from the lawn - gnats swirled in a perichoresis of light, dance and breeze - drifting in the growing shafts of sunrise light. Pesky, annoying joy that hovers and cannot be swatted away.
And me. I sat in the new-wood Papa E rocking chair, dressed in a white-but-not-choir-robe, reveling in the message. The world is messy and chaotic. There is peril and noise. Ideals are broken and hopes shattered. But the earth is (still) the LORD's, and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein. And as such, (im)perfect and (scarred)sacred. Let everything that has breath praise the Lord. And the people said... Selah.
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