Monthly Musings:
When I was very young, like many children before and after me, I was fascinated by dinosaurs. There is something about childhood imagination which lends itself to consideration of those things outside of what we can see. That enormous creatures once existed on alien landscapes here on Earth was an idea that obsessed and consumed me when I was little. Even before I started school, any time someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I answered “Archaeologist” (an answer I modified to “Paleontologist” somewhere around grade 2). Sensing incantatory power in words, I could name 20-30 different species of dinosaur with long Greek and Latin names (in some case, strangely combining the two classic languages). Confined in those days to a far more limited range of books for kids on the subject, I read and re-read my “How and Why Book of Dinosaurs” and its “Golden Books” equivalent until the pages were dog eared and yellowed.
If my life had followed the course I expected as a child, I no doubt would have spent my life in isolated areas and musty institutional basements peering at fragments of teeth and bones and trying to discern between minute differences between the same. This didn’t happen.
I’m sure there are some people who chart a course in life from an early age and follow it without constantly losing their map or exchanging it for a new one. But for most of us, I doubt this is the case. Our worship theme this month reflects this reality, as we look at Trickster Tales and Life’s Curveballs. A great many cultures have Trickster figures in their stories and mythologies. Sometimes comic, sometimes not, Tricksters disrupt the order of things. These stories teach us some part of the truth that we may have missed otherwise and remind us that the best laid plans are always subject to interference from the world at large.
This month in CYRE we will be meeting a number of these figures, among them will be Anansi the Spider, Coyote, and Zomo the Rabbit. We’ll have a visit from our outdoor education maven Joanne Tunnicliffe on October 6th to explore spiders and the natural world, we’ll talk about tricksters around the world on Oct. 13, and then consider how humour helps and how and why it sometimes hurts on Oct. 20. Finally, On October 27th we’ll see how “Trick and Treating” fits into the larger picture. Yours in Service, Tim