Lions and Lambs and Climate and Forests

Today's Old Testament lesson (Isaiah 11:1-10) is the one that promises that the wolf shall live with the lamb and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. In my psychology class I teach about altered states of consciousness. This altered vision of reality must come from some such altered dream state, as we all know that a wolf would not be a wolf if it didn't prey on animals like sheep, nor a lion a lion if it wasn't a carnivore. This is not a description of some possible state where everything works the way it is supposed to. In fact, predators and prey, scavengers, even the worms, bugs and microbes that feed on decomposing bodies, are part of what we recognize as the natural order of things that we mess with at our peril. No, this is metaphor that speaks to something much more real than our physical world and it's order, it speaks to our greatest fears and vulnerabilities. In Isaiah's time, just the sheer vulnerability of life would have been constantly in the forefront. Things could change in an instant; dangers from wild beasts and poisonous snakes, but also from wars and cruel leaders and simply man's inhumanity to man. Perhaps today the stark fear of violent death is less an issue than for our ancestors, but we too have dreads that sit at the pit of our stomach and cause us untold anxiety. What will we do when the climate is changing more rapidly than our infrastructure can handle? When the rainforests are all gone? When there are no more wild fish in the seas? In church this morning, one man's t-shirt read; "Only when the last tree has died, the last river has been poisoned and the last fish has been caught will we realize that we cannot eat money." Perhaps these concerns are the lions and bears and adders and asps of our time -- the forces outside our carefully circumscribed lives and beyond our control that we know, even as we know they are forces of nature that are not inherently evil, still threaten to bring us harm and destruction.

So, what does Isaiah pose as the cure for our very real and rational fears about the potentially destructive natural forces in life? I find it to be an enigma. Buddhists would say that one must realize that it is both all an illusion and that it is all one -- one creation of which we too are part of the whole. To accept the true nature of things, avoiding attachments that deceive us into wishing permanence for that which is inherently temporary, is to free one's self from suffering. But here in Isaiah, we are told that the cure is in moving from rightness to righteousness. "He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear; but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth." Perhaps he is saying that our fears of the destructive natural powers are not so much about the natural order of things after all--that they are displaced. Might our anxiety actually stem from all the ways that we fail to live up to our ideals? Do guilt and shame transform the uncertain and very temporary nature of our lives from something that just is into something fraught with terrors and menace? Can the simple word of truth ("he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked") turn everything back around?

--AnnBarbie