I’ve been wondering about Noah’s ark. It occurs to me that our home is an ark of sorts during the tropical storms of the rainy seasons – Wally’s ark! We head for the house when it rains. The dogs make a bee line, anxious to have an excuse to be inside. Even the varmints: mice, termites, ants and scorpions escape the wet wheedling their way inside. When there is a storm everything looks for shelter. Inside, we huddle together watching the light strobe, bracing for the thunder, feeling its rumble, listening to the wind and rain pound the windows and roof. Inside it is still and we wait. We sense the wild, destructive force of nature. Who knows how the storm will play?
God told Noah to bring all the animals into the ark – the opposites, male, female, wild, tame, clean, unclean, crawling, flying – and once inside they are locked in together. The differences between one human to another, between people and animals, between kinds of animals are mind boggling. So the ark becomes the place where humans and animals must do the messy work of living together.
It’s not a children’s story, and it’s more than a story about a flood. It’s a metaphor about living in relationships. That’s the pattern I’m seeing in everything lately, that’s why ecology feels so important. Learning to live locked in with differences, learning acceptance, being willing to change for the sake of survival … it’s a veritable laboratory of relationships!
Forgiveness will be necessary to make the connections. Fr. Richard Rohr says, “Forgiveness is the only way to free ourselves from the entrapment of the past. Nothing new happens without it.” He thinks that the first forgiveness we experience is to forgive reality itself for not meeting our needs. There are some things that can’t be reconciled. We will have to find a way to live with them. It will mean holding together that gathering of contraries. Again, connection, the Divine Mystery that holds all things together – call it ark ecology.
What happens in the ark doesn’t stay in the ark. It seeds the earth.
Kind of interesting when you think about it: the ark was built to save the world. Maybe the work of living together with what is inside the ark, the relationships, is the real story of salvation.
