Possum Christ?

This poor little possum escorted me up the driveway into St. Augustine's House last Thursday evening, much like the Verger at Christ Church Cranbrook leading the procession on solemn occasions. This little animal was no grand costumed figure, however, but rather a half-bald casualty of the most bitter winter we have endured within memory. The poor creature's natural caution had been frozen out of existence, I expect, and I know it must have been close to starvation, because on my way out a few hours later I encountered the same forlorn animal, crouched over the roadkill remains of another animal of the same species. A mate, perhaps, or offspring.

Who wants to think about such things, or witness them? It appalls me, and would make me even more sad if I weren't a deer hunter and used to pondering the dark side of nature's ways. I know it has to fit in somewhere, however painfully.

Elizabeth Johnson, s Roman Catholic theologian at Fordham University, spoke at the Trinity Institute last fall about "deep incarnation", about the embodiment of God reaching far past its human manifestation and to embrace the entire creation with all its travail and tragedy. Thus we read in Colossians 1:23 how the "gospel which you heard...has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven...[that] through [Christ] God was pleased to reconcile all things, whether on earth or in heaven...".

Does that include my little cannibal possum? Was that a little Possum/Christ I saw, escorting me into church before attending to its grisly evening meal?

If so, I have to do better than just feel disgusted and sad.  I have to feel this winter in my bones. I have to overcome my fastidiousness and repulsion, whether toward the loathsome diet of a starving possum or the bodily excretions of my dying father-in-law.  I have to do something with my anger at God, whose way of beholding and inhabiting this universal winter seems so inscrutable. I have to do something more with it because, if Christ is anywhere at all, Christ must  must be present here, before my eyes, bereft of fur and vestments, Christ with tiny pink paws padding along the frozen road.
 
We praise you possum Christ,
      Verger in the wild;
      I love you, though you are not nice;
      In you, the world is reconciled.