Rest a while

This Sunday, 6^th Sunday of Ordinary Time (Year C) is known as World Marriage Sunday.

There’s no swiping right on Tinder for the animal kingdom. Instead, many species of wildlife must risk life and limb to find a partner so they can breed and avoid extinction.

Over five episodes, David Attenborough’s The Mating Game turns the spotlight on the sex lives of creatures big and small.

The mating rituals of wildlife from termites, worms and spiders to humpback whales, zebras and giant pandas are exposed in this latest documentary, recently aired on TV1 on Sunday evenings.

From grasslands to the ocean, from jungle to freshwater, and at times against all odds, the viewer witnesses bitter rivalry, ingenious strategies, and quite spectacular rituals.

The documentary captures the extraordinary lengths – dramatic, unexpected and, sometimes, comical – to which creatures will go in their desire to find a partner in habitats from every corner of the globe.

The documentary also turns the spotlight on some mating strategies that are so extreme that they have no connection with anything else.

Commenting on the mating ritual of the hairy angler fish, Attenborough comments, “The female takes the male, which is very small, and the male clings on to her, and the two fuse so that they become one, and their very blood circulation is shared between them. The male is reduced to a sperm-producing mechanism, but it’s served its purpose because it has brought a different set of genes into the gene pool. “

Attenborough comments, “all life is driven by the need to breed”; in that breeding is the continuation of the species.

The documentary excluded one of the biggest groups of the animal kingdom! Humans.

Humans can move on their own and are placed in the animal kingdom. Further, humans belong to the animal phylum known as chordates because we have a backbone. The human-animal has hair and milk glands, so we are placed in the class of mammals.

It appears that we can sneak in with our long-distanced lens cameras and observe a giant toad copulating, a male and female ostrich engaged in an intimate pre-mating dance, and on the plains of Texas be absorbed as a dominant wild turkey is aided by his less impressive brothers who help keep rival males at bay whilst the top male turkey secures as many mates as possible.

And none of this “watching” is considered ‘voyeurism’; I, and no doubt many others sat watching as other species were engaged in copulation!

So, what makes this animal (humans) insist on privacy, the lights out, the door closed, the sheets covered over, while zebra, and the ostrich engage with one another on the open savannahs of Africa, spider and tamarin monkeys mate with one another in the jungles of the amazon, and humpback whales call to one another off the coastline of Hawaii.

Maybe it is because we have a different name for The Mating Game; we call it Love-making, and while many species of wildlife risk their life and limb to find a partner, and copulate – it is for the sake of the species; they breed in order to survive. For the human, animal species, the preservation of the species is not the uppermost intention of a human couple lying together, rather it is the most intimate way of saying to the other, “I love you” and that is confirmed by the intimacy and immediacy of the physical act of intercourse.

An intriguing aspect of the documentary was that while precoital rituals were at times extravagant, once coitus had been achieved, separation was immediate, the ground squirrel was back to its hole in the desert of Morocco, both male Zebra stallion and mare resume their grazing on the grasslands, and the chimpanzee and gibbon were off looking for the juiciest of branches.

For many couples, the postcoital lying in each others arms, the gentle touch of skin on skin, the “pillow talk” continues the ‘love-making’. Humans in fact, don’t mate; humans love.

The illustration is of Flamingos. Flamingos have a staggering 136 moves that they display in order to attract a mate, according to new research.

I have a vague recollection of learning to swim; it certainly involved the use of a flutterboard and the shallow end of the school swimming pool. It also involved going side to side in the shallow end. The security was I was able to put my feet on the bottom of the pool and my head would be above the water. I have no recollection of the transition to deeper parts of the pool – however, I do remember that by the end of my schooling I was swimming lengthwise which meant of course engaging with the “deep end”. This Sunday’s Gospel (Luke 5: 1 – 11) has this request of Jesus to the fishermen whose boat he had sequestered “ put out into the deep water and let down your net for a catch.” (v.4). Put quite simply, ‘engage with the deep’. The preceding verses are worth noting because it tells us two important facts; firstly, the request was to fisherman who had already been fishing all night, “we have worked all night and caught nothing.” (v.5), and, secondly, “they were washing their nets.” (v. 2) When I read the Gospel event symbolically, I read something like “we have done our work (which resulted in nothing), and now we are tidying up, why would we want to go out again (at the request of someone who knows nothing about the wind, the tides [“he is the carpenter’s son surely”]. Again, as our Church enters this time of Synodalitymaybe there is something in this story that may be of advantage; for example, listen to the voice of the other (especially the voice that ”supposedly” knows nothing; listen to the voice of the one(s) on the edge, “once while Jesus was standing beside the lake .” (v. 1); be prepared to take what has already been cleaned and go out into the deep, where you cannot stand up (yikes!) and you may even need the supporting hand of another (double yikes!!), and, be prepared for the clean nets to be dirtied again! And the biggest yikes of all, “so they signalled their partners in the other boat to come and help them.” (7)

The illustration is of what is known as The Ancient Galilee Boat; it is an ancient fishing boat from the 1st century AD, discovered in 1986 on the northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee in Israel. The remains of the boat, 27 feet (8.27 meters) long, 7.5 feet (2.3 meters) wide and with a maximum preserved height of 4.3 feet (1.3 meters), first appeared during a drought, when the waters of the Sea (which is actually a great fresh-water lake) receded. Upon retrieval, by archaeologists, the boat was then submerged in a wax bath for 12 years, which protected the boat before it could be displayed at the Yigal Allon Museum in Museum in Kibbutz Ginosar, Israel.

The famous saying “He loves me … he loves me not” comes from one of the oldest and most loved classical ballets, Giselle.

In a scene from the 1841 ballet Giselle, a peasant girl, is presented with a daisy by her love Albrecht, a duke. Albrecht and Giselle dance and she plucks the petals from a daisy to divine his sincerity.

The result is of course with all the plucking the flower is destroyed!

When attempting to make any comment on the second reading from this Sunday’s liturgy, 1Corinthians 13: 1 – 13, which is headlined ‘The Gift of Love’, I feel somewhat like Giselle – too much plucking and the entire flower is destroyed.

Apparently, the Inuit language has thirty words for snow.

This reflects the need for clarity in the culture’s complex relationship to snow. Sanskrit, the basis for most East Indian languages, has ninety-six terms for love.

Ancient Persian has eighty; Greek has four, English only one.

English does not have the breadth, scope, and differentiation for the feeling experience of love like Sanskrit and Persian.

If it did then we would have a specific word to use in our appreciation of mother, father, husband, wife, lover, sunset, house, or God.

St Paul wrote in Greek, so there may be value in a very brief look at the four words used in Greek.

The first Greek word is ‘storge’ which may best be described as ‘affection’; the second Greek word is ‘philia’ or ‘friendship’; the third word is ‘eros’, or ‘romantic’, and the fourth is ‘agape’, or ‘selfless’.

It is this fourth word ‘agape’ that St Paul uses in his description of love in Chapter 13.

I have attempted to illustrate by a diagram – the four-leaf clover.

Each leaf holds one of the energies of love, and each is critical to the formation and structure of the leaf, as each is critical to the formation of the human person.

Pluck/remove one and there is no longer a four-leaf clover.

Each of these elements we carry as a human person, made in the image and likeness of our God (Imago Dei), and at certain circumstances in our life, one of these energies will be activated either by myself, by another, or by a situation I encounter.

When I live out of (and perhaps live into) love I am showing my God to my world.