Wednesday October 28, 2009
People and pests
By Jim Taylor
Our cat Joey caught a mouse the other day. Joey generally prefers occupying my lounge chair in front of the fireplace to catching mice. In fact, in the two years we’ve had him, this is the first time I’ve seen him catch anything other than his tail in the door.
Joan looked out, and saw Joey playing with something. He grabbed it in his mouth, flung it in the air, pounced on it, then flung it in the air and pounced again…
I went out to check. Joey had a mouse. A small, wet, beslobbered, utterly terrified little mouse. The words of Scottish poet Robbie Burns fitted well:
Oh, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
The mouse, suddenly released from torment, looked around desperately with its beady black eyes. Then it scuttled for the closest shelter, which happened to be – I still find this hard to believe – between Joey’s legs. Under Joey’s belly.
It makes me wonder why biologists would choose mice for testing intelligence.
Unwelcome visitors
It also makes me wonder why I should bother protecting a mouse. Mice are, after all, pests. We hire exterminators to get rid of them. Ruthless reason suggests that I would have been smarter to kill the “wee beastie” than save it.
Is it just that they look so cute?
Deer also look adorably cute, with those big soft Bambi eyes. But they too are pests. Joan looked out the other morning and announced, “Look! The deer have stripped the bark off the weeping spruce again!”
She had been out the day before, weeding the flower bed around that tree. The bark was still undamaged then.
This is the second weeping spruce we’ve planted. The deer stripped the first one, two winters ago, by rubbing their horns against its trunk. I protected the second tree through its first winter by building a fortress of chicken wire around it, as impenetrable as most U.S. embassies in foreign countries.
But this year, I was one day late installing the fortress.
I regret to say that I muttered a string of undeleted expletives that once-President Richard Nixon might have envied.
The deer also nibbled the buds off all our roses. Ate all the foliage off a young cut-leaf maple. And chomped a thriving young hawthorn tree back to a hawthorn bush.
Peaceable coexistence
And yet I still get a thrill, watching them saunter across our lawn in the evening dusk.
Deer and mice are a mixed blessing. The story of creation says that God made all the creatures, and declared them good. But perhaps goodness depends on its interaction with other elements of creation.
The prophet Isaiah visualized lions and lambs lying down together. Ideally, he believed, all God’s creatures – including humans – should live together in harmony.
I’m willing to make some sacrifices, so that the animals can continue to thrive.
I just wish those animals would try equally hard to live in harmony with me.
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Copyright © 2009 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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Your Turn
No mail last week about the column on relinquishing our road rights to cars. Oh well…
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About My Paraphrases
Occasionally, I get frustrated by the Bible. Not usually by the message, which is timeless, but by the language and metaphor. Contemporary translations update the language, but not the metaphor, so the text still expects us to respond to images of deserts and tents, camels and droughts, kings and concubines. Whatever we’ve learned since the Bible was written — about psychology and evolution, about quantum physics and astronomy, computers and fossil fuels – is simply left out.
At such times, I start paraphrasing. I don’t pretend that these paraphrases are true to original texts. They are, rather, my way of writing what I think the original writers might have said IF they lived today. Sometimes I stick close to the traditional versification; sometimes I take liberties.
My paraphrase of Paul’s letter to the Romans attempts to put Paul’s sometimes convoluted words — and argument — into a contemporary setting. If Paul were writing today, to the Christian church, I’m not sure he’d worry as much about the failure of the Jews to follow Christ as about the failure of Christians to follow Christ, so I have rephrased in those terms. I suspect he would also make use of quotations from the Gospels — which of course didn’t exist when he wrote his letters — rather than using quotations from the only scriptures he had available, which we call the Old Testament.
I also have paraphrases for Ecclesiastes and Job. Ecclesiastes sticks pretty much to the biblical flow of verses – though with, I hope, some sense of humour. Job cuts 42 chapters down to about three pages. I found the speeches in Job interminable; the only way I could make sense of the various characters’ verbal meanderings was to turn them into television sound-bites.
I make all these available on the honour system. You send me an e-mail and request the file you want. I’ll send it. If you like it, and want to keep it, you send me a cheque for $5 by snail mail. If you don’t like it, simply erase it from your hard disk and send nothing.
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TECHNICAL STUFF
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PROMOTION STUFF…
If you know someone else who might like to receive this column regularly via e-mail, send a request to jimt@quixotic.ca. Or, if you wish, forward them a copy of this column. But please put your name on it, so they don’t think I’m sending out spam.
For a lighter look at life, faith, and the lectionary, I recommend my friend Ralph Milton’s weekly e-newsletter Rumors. You can subscribe to it by sending a note to ralphmilton@woodlake.com.
For other web links worth pursuing, try
- Charlene Fairchild’s United Online site,
- David Keating’s “SeemslikeGod” page
- The Canadian Centre for Progressive Christianity home page
- Alva Wood’s satiric stories about small town attitudes and bumbling bureaucrats are not particularly religious, but good fun anyway; write alvawood@gmail.com to get onto her mailing list.
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