BE LIKE RATS? YES, IT WOULD BE AN IMPROVEMENT [R, 5-21-20]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Times of Winter

BE LIKE RATS?         YES, IT WOULD BE AN IMPROVEMENT [R, 5-21-20]

Bob Doherty came through Charleston, IL once when I was pastoring there. I can’t remember why. He was a Jesuit from Boston, and a specialist in spirituality. We usually don’t do spirituality very well in Methodism, and I wanted to take advantage of his presence so had him give a presentation at our church. In the process, he said…

…you should never try to read or write while sitting under a tree, because nature is so spiritual that it takes away your ability to do practical stuff. I think that’s true. If you’re in nature in your body, it’s hard to be anywhere else in your head.

…don’t take your aging mother to see a neighbor’s slides. Bob did that. His mother was beginning to lose her wits a bit. They sat in the darkness, watching the slides of the neighbor’s vacation trip, when she blurted out, “Oh, this is so boring.” She had gotten the senses confused and was under the impression people could not hear her in the dark.

…don’t underestimate rats. He had gone, with a group from the states, to Calcutta, to work for a week with Mother Theresa, mostly picking up dead bodies on the streets before dawn and giving those folks last rites. One of their group had a sack of hard candies, which he put up on top of a metal wardrobe when they went to bed in their dorm-like room.

In the middle of the night, they heard a thud against the metal. Someone turned on a flashlight. A rat had run hard and jumped as high as it could into the cabinet and made a dent in the metal.  Stupid rat. Thought it could jump high enough to get those candies. But then…

…another rat ran over the first one and used it as a spring board to jump higher and use its head to make a higher dent in the metal. This they kept doing until there were enough dents up the metal for a rat to use them as footholds to climb all the way to the top and throw the sack down.

I don’t know how they chose which rats got to get the migraines, and which one got to be the hero and go all the way to the top, but Bob said he had never seen a better example of self-sacrifice for the common good. Apparently even the rats were influenced by the example of Mother Theresa.

Really, I’m not sure just how spiritual it is to bang your head against the hard places, but I’ve done a lot of that, and I hope it’s been useful to my fellow candy-hopefuls, even though it’s left me with a bit of a headache.

John Robert McFarland