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Reflection for May 21 2006

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One day the Little Prince in Antoine de Saint-Exupery's story of the same name came across a fox and said, "Come and play with me," but the fox replied, "I can't play with you. I am not tamed." The Little Prince, coming as he did from a tiny asteroid and being unfamiliar with earthly ways, asked the fox what he meant by the word tame. "It means to establish ties," said the fox. "To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world."

The fox went on to say, "My life is very monotonous. I hunt chickens; men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike, and all the men are just alike. And in consequence, I am a little bored. But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow." Having said all that the fox then looked at the Little Prince for a long time and finally said, "Please - tame me!"

I said as much when for the first time in my life - much to my surprise - I fell in love. Up until then I lived in a world of mostly strangers and acquaintances at best. Life was like driving down a freeway all enclosed or like passing through some airline terminal surrounded by people caught up in their private concerns and destinations even as I was in mine - and what was my concern but a transient need to get from here to there or from this to that. I lived in that "objective" world makes solitaries of us all.

And then one day someone said to me (in a way I had never heard before), "I want to be your friend." Suddenly I realized that until then I had been living like that fox, hunting and being hunted when not engaged in vanishing into my burrow. Suddenly someone wanted "to establish ties" with me - to invite me to pass from a merely "objective" existence into a deeply personal, "subject to subject" kind of existence. In other words: to tame me - and the effect was so potent I almost blew a gasket. Someone loved me. Someone loved me? Someone loved me?

But why should that have been so incredible? I think it's because, society being the way it is, survival seems to take priority over living. We're brought up to insulate ourselves from a violent world. Or as the fox says, "Men have no time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends any more." And as for finding a friend in God, how can we, when we're taught to see him as placed so high above the clouds and passively awaiting our initiative before he will consider our case? And so even with God, it's back to our burrows we go.

But where the heck did we get the notion of God's being so remote and passive, a mere object like some statue on a pedestal instead of an active subject in our lives, when all the while the New Testament teaches he's not only active but proactive? It must have been such abject persistence that provoked the author of today's second and third readings to insist that God is Love and that it's God who has always taken the initiative in our relationship. What else can he mean when he says, "In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us" and when he has Christ say, "It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you." Dare we let those words sink in and run the risk of having that wonderful experience of blowing a gasket!?

-- Geoff Wood