Redeemer Review
The Episcopal Church of the Redeemer
July/August, 2006
From the Vicar
NOTES FROM THE COACH: Dog is God Spelled Backwards
One of my favorite half hours of the day is when I go walking with my dog Mystique. Each of us has
our own way of contemplating the beauties of God’s creation. Mystique likes to sprint and stop, while I like
to maintain a steady pace. But because I love her, we compromise. Sometimes I make her come with me,
but other times we stop. I marvel that she can work a bush with her nose with as much depth and patience
as a saint in prayer. She, in turn, inspires me to pause and do some of my own sacred breathing. Then we’re
off again.
Like Moses, I love to take off my shoes and feel the holy ground between my toes and to reflect that I
am made from the same stuff as the earth. Like a forest, my body is an ecosystem of air, water, chemicals,
bacteria, little cells of which I am rarely even aware, all of them working in balance, a pulsing dance of life.
When I get sick, I can actually feel the lack of balance, as if the dancer within has pulled a muscle. Part of
my care plan at that time is body prayer for me and compassion prayers for my brothers and sisters who are
also ill. Because I have encountered God so clearly in creation, I am wary of those who would separate me
from this natural world and claim that being human is somehow exempt from mammalian existence. I love
the gift of technology, but Mystique reminds me that I am also an animal. Part of what we humans do is to
create machines, but only God creates life. In addition God creates each life individually: individual stalks of
grass, individual ladybugs, birds, cats, possums and skunks, each one unique. It takes time to walk down a
street and ponder all the individual things going on. It’s tempting to save time and think in statistics. But if I
do, warns God, I may very well miss the point.
Summer is the season whose gift is time. In our hemisphere at least, the days grow longer. The
weather warms our weary bones. Summer is a time to play, go on vacation, get engrossed in wonderful
novels, go to baseball games and pursue our own interests in depth. When I am given the time to do what I
love, life itself becomes a practice of love. When I can stand on a wooden porch and listen to the lapping
of water against smooth stones, I feel the waters of life lapping within me and revivifying my spent and tired
soul. And without my knowing it, sort of like an afternoon sky that turns suddenly into a breathtaking sunset, I
suddenly find myself with God. Just as the air is clearer at high altitudes where it is thinner, God is best
revealed when my schedule gets a little thinner. If God appeared to Moses as a wonderful burning bush,
maybe I, too, am a bush that God touches gently with her nose, breathing her warm breath into me and
making me grateful to be alive.
It’s why I shiver a little when people call me “hard wired.” “Hard wired” implies that I am finished. If
that were so, I’d never need summer, never need the parables about the seeds and the sun and the
growing things that we read during the summer. I’m going to take some time this summer to grow. I’ll be
leaving Redeemer in Rev. Lynn’s capable hands between July 10th and the 31st. I invite you, too, to take time
this summer, to follow your dreams and do what you love. God, after all, is a love story.
Blessings,
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