The Coyote Was Never Real
Dublin, NH
We made it through the heat wave here in Dublin, and the morning air finally has that washed, blessed feeling to it. Cooler, quieter, though a persistent rain has been dampening both plans and spirits since yesterday. Nobody minds saying so out loud. After days that pressed down on everyone, a little rain that keeps you inside feels almost like a kindness with poor timing.
Last week, before the heat broke, I watched something at the beach I haven't stopped thinking about.
The lifeguards here have a goose problem. The same problem I've been fighting all year on a smaller scale. Their solution has two parts. At the end of the day, they erect a low fence between the water and the grass, marking a line the geese are supposed to respect. And somewhere on the beach, moved from place to place through the days, stands a coyote. Lifelike, still, convincing only from thirty feet. Not alive.
What I watched, on the busiest day of the week, was a string of children walking straight up to the coyote and petting it. Not warily, not testing it first. Running their hands along its plastic fur the way you'd greet a dog you already loved. Nobody had told them the rules of the performance were to be a fraid so they simply didn't play along.
And here's the detail that's been sitting with me since. The fence is three feet high. Any goose willing to try it could clear it without much effort. The “coyote” is more doll than dog. The whole system, fence and decoy both , runs on consent, not force. It scares those who never test it.
I don't think the fence began as cruelty. It began the way most fences do: as management of scarcity. Not enough clean grass. Not enough patience for mess. Not enough trust that mess can be lived with instead of expelled.
Jesus said the opposite plainly, to the ones most tempted to worry: *Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom* (Luke 12:32). Not to guard it. Not to fence it. To give it.
Little Flock. The Flock may be wider than it first sounds. Maybe it includes us, and the geese, and the children, and the mergansers, and the loon, and the oaks, and the pines.
Surely the Lord of all creation is concerned for all of creation.
The Father's good pleasure to give the kingdom was never sized to fit one species, one shoreline, or one Tuesday afternoon in July. God's world was never divided the way our fences divide it. It's our own anxiety, about scarcity, about mess, about what might happen, that keeps building fences, real and invisible both, and calling the fences necessary.
Even the fear these obstacles are built to produce has no real object in it. The geese who flee aren't fleeing danger; they're just reacting to a threat with no substance.
But the fear I've been circling all week isn't that one. It's the fear with nothing in front of it at all . Fear of what hasn't happened, may never happen, and can't be stopped by worrying about it early. Anticipatory anxiety. That fear protects nothing. It only charges interest against a future that hasn't arrived.
I have children, and before long they'll walk onto a beach that isn't so gentle - real dangers, fences worth respecting. I don't wish for them a world with no fear in it; some fear is wisdom keeping pace with what's true. But I hope they keep what those children on the beach still had: hands that reach before they calculate, a love that hasn't yet been taught to flinch first and ask questions later. I hope the noise of growing up doesn't teach them to be afraid of more than the world actually contains.
A Prayer
Father, whose good pleasure is not to guard the kingdom but to give it, to us and the geese and the children and the mergansers and the loon and the oaks and the pines alike: you built no fences into this world; we built our own, out of scarcity, out of mess we didn't want to face, out of fears that never had a body to begin with. Make us little enough again to reach before we calculate, trusting what you already delight to give the whole of what you have made. Through Christ, who touched what fear said not to touch, and was not afraid. Amen.
