The Howling Coyote

It begins every morning lately with a singular squirrel coming to inquire about the seed.  This is my reminder to get to my duty of laying some out on the railing.  This morning it required me to get a brand new bag from the garage, and so to the dismay of my friend, it took several lectures (they stamp their front paw and squawk) before I was rousted from my deck chair and satisfied his demands.

 

This amusing menagerie has been such a gift, a source of much entertainment in the last few months since we moved in.  Our most frequent visitors are squirrels, chipmunks, Steller's jays, and chickadees.  We have a brazen gang of raccoons that occasionally come out at night.  Two weeks ago, we had our first evidence of a bear, a knocked down, busted open garbage bin with its contents strewn all over.

We also have neighborhood coyote packs, but those are most often heard than seen.  There is a pattern we hear regularly, one begins to howl and then the others join in, a chorus of mournful crying that always reminds me of those scenes in movies when someone walks into a dog pound and 50 dog voices are simultaneously calling to be set free.  It lasts maybe a minute or two, and then it's done.  I don't know what's actually happening, but in my imagination, they've all located each other and are now trotting off to perform some mischief.

Last night broke this pattern, though.  We were awakened in the middle of the night by this desperate crying, a howling like I've never heard. Patrick had to tell me it was a coyote.  It sounded like some kind of tortured, desperately bleating farm animal.  And this time, there was no response from its compatriots.  It went on and on for like 20 minutes, with no community gathering, no rescue. I was both concerned for the poor creature and highly annoyed that it had interrupted my sleep. 

One of my struggles about writing lately has been that I feel like if it doesn't come somewhat naturally, I'm just forcing something that isn't there.  I feel like I have these lenses in my eyes, in my brain, that are analogy and metaphor. For so many years it was my pleasure to derive a deeper meaning from everything I saw and experienced.  Lately, I've begun to wonder if that's even healthy.  I've found myself trying to force an analogy and having to step in and stop myself and just let it be a thing that happened.

But I sipped a bit more of Luci Shaw's God In The Dark again this morning, and this is what she says about writing (for her, specifically poetry):

"[Poetry] grapples the issues of existence and reality and death through a thousand lenses--the small happenings by which we search out ourselves and God refract the light into colored splinters. I have never lived so intensely or reflectively as during the last two and a  half years, and writing is my best way to discover the meaning of it all...When I write poetry I am translating my life into art."

Which I quote here really only to say that I guess I am in good company in trying to make meaning in what I see and experience.  And to give myself permission to identify to the howling, distressed coyote. 

Because as I listened, even while wishing angrily that I was sleeping, I empathized.  Like no other time in my life so far, I feel like I am crying out with no response. The usual pattern of God being responsive to my cries to which I have been accustomed seems to be currently muted.

It's unsettling to hear a distressed animal in the night and it's unsettling to hear a Christian say that God is unresponsive.  We love our call-and-response verses like Psalm 34:6, "This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him, and saved him out of all his troubles."  But we don't talk as much about Psalm 88:13-14, "I cry to you for help, Lord; in the morning my prayer comes before you. Why, Lord, do you reject me and hide your face from me?"

When Christians do talk about this being their experience, our gut-level believer reaction is: 1) they are wrong...God is talking, they're just not listening or don't like what they're hearing, or 2) they are doing something wrong and this is causing the lack of response.  If we just figure out what this is, we can clear it out and unclog the channel of communication again. (I find both of these insufficient. And, whew, don't get me started on others' treatment of me as a problem to be solved rather than a traveler on a journey or a learner in progress.)

I don't know how the coyote got separated from his troop or why no one came when he called.  There could be a lot of reasons.  I don't know why God feels so distant and unresponsive right now; there also may be a lot of reasons.  But I'm also in a place where I'm not going to take all the blame and self-flagellate. (Believe me, if it's my fault for some reason, I've already considered it.) I'm instead considering this something of a curiosity...unchartered territory to be explored.  I'm trying to stop solving it like a puzzle and instead just trying to live it like part of the journey.

I don't know where it will lead to or what my relationship with God will look like on the other side of it.  Will it return to feeling like it used to or is this a crossroads at which it transitions into something entirely different?  I have heard others farther along talk as if it could be either. Or a mixture of both or something other than both?  

I'm tired of the answers that aren't answers and the comfort that is not comfort. The platitudes, as it were. I've been at this too long to pretend anymore, and I see pretense and pretending wherever I look.  It's probably good right now that I spend much of my time alone, on this deck.