Dear Friends:

In our Gospel reading for this Sunday, we will hear Mark’s version of Jesus’ forty days in wilderness. His telling of the story is very short. He says only that Jesus was tempted by Satan, was with wild beasts and was ministered to by angels.

I have always assumed that the wild beasts Jesus encountered in this story were dangerous, antagonistic creatures, symbolic of the obstacles and adversaries that threaten our wellbeing and get in our way. But this year, I spent some time with some alternative scholarship on this text that focuses on the Greek word for “with,” a word which connotes collaboration, communion, commonality of purpose. Jesus was “with” the wild beasts.

Could it be that these wild things Jesus encountered in the wilderness grew to be his companions, and not his adversaries? Could it be that reference to wild creatures is intended to remind us of the reconciliation depicted by the Prophet Isaiah in his vision of a “Peaceable Kingdom,” where the wolf lives with the lamb, the leopard lies down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together? (Is. 11:6)

Might this be invitation to us during this season of Lent to re-fashion our attitude toward the “wild things” in our own lives, embracing them as an opportunity for reconciliation, companionship, and peace?

With this in mind I offer you this poem by Wendall Berry, one of my favorites:

The Peace of Wild Things*

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

May your first week of Lent be holy and blessed,

Amelie+

*Wendall Berry, in The Selected Poems of Wendall Berry (Kindle Version)