Wasn’t it a snake who in the third chapter of Genesis knew that it did not, after all, kill a person to wrestle with learning the difference between good and evil?
And isn't it Jesus who teaches us that taking the risk of moral discernment and decision is part of our responsibility as disciples? And indeed doesn't Jesus say right out loud to us in Matthew 10, "Be ye therefore wise as serpents and harmless as doves"?
What does it take to be wise as a snake? We must be willing to enter into the divine transformation that is already on the move in our midst.
In her novel, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, the acclaimed Native American writer Louise Erdrich provides a hint of what being wise as a serpent might look like. Her main character is Father Damien, actually a woman in the guise of a male priest, who over many years and through many tumults has been adopted into the community of Ojibwe people with whom he is in ministry.
When Father Damien is alone, we readers usually know her as Agnes, her birth name, who in addition to being a reverent and devoted priest, is also an artist in love with the piano. Soon after the community builds a new church into a “craggy cliff” with a “flat slab of rock” for its floor, Father Damien/Agnes is alone in the sanctuary one afternoon, and sits down at the keyboard to play.
“She played in the embrace of that special sense of being heard, that expectancy, but when she finally set her hands in her lap and looked up to acknowledge the listener, no one was there. Only the still new leaves faintly twitching between the studs and the haze of gold light through the tremulous scatter of clouds. It wasn’t until she saw a twist of movement from the corner of her eye that she looked down and saw the snakes.
. . . . There were at least a hundred. More. Another moved, quick as a lash. Yet another seeped forward and Agnes put her fingers back upon the keys. A third uncoiled in a question mark that she answered with a smooth bacarolle, which seemed the right thing to play for snakes. She watched them out of the corner of her eyes. They were motionless now, their ligulate, black bellies flat against the stone. Parallel gold stripes down the center of their backs seemed to vibrate in the fresh June light. The snakes looked polished brand-new. Perhaps they’d shed their skins at the door, she thought, and even as her fingers rippled she imagined a pile of frail husks.” (p. 219-220)
Perhaps what it takes to be wise as a snake is the courage to shed our skins. The courage to burst forth again and again—
to allow divine love to move us so completely
that greed and fear lose their grip on us,
their fingers sliding off our necks utterly empty,
as our hearts sway to the music of God's cherishing
and even our moments of anguish
can be times when we learn to find love stirring
within us more deeply than ever before.
The Trappist monk and peace activist Thomas Merton had faith that, as he wrote, “There is in us an instinct for newness, for renewal, for a liberation of creative power. We need to awaken within ourselves a force which really changes our lives from within. And yet the same instinct tells us that this change is a recovery of that which is deepest, most original, most personal in ourselves. To be born again is not to become somebody else, *but to become ourselves.*”
May we learn to enter, breath by breath, into the liberating presence of God. May we be wise as serpents,
moving to the rhythms and melodies of the Holy Spirit.
May we burst forth from our old skins again and again,
to become ourselves and to transform our world,
leaving behind us a testimony
of frail husks.
Amen.
This quotation from Merton may be found on page 64 in Christine Bochen’s book, "Thomas Merton, Essential Writings."