Climbing the Mountain

Welcome to Darrell's weblog. Here you will find inspirational writings and some of my thoughts on our world. I am a faithful Catholic. My views are orthodox and mystical, and I believe in the Tradition and Authority of the Church. My writings reflect this.

Name:
Location: Arizona, United States

Thursday, January 25, 2007

Mr. Pack Rat


Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul, Apostle

Back in October, when the weather had started to cool off just a little, I decided to clean out my storage shed. I had noticed some rodent droppings recently, and some things weren’t where I’d left them. When I moved some of the clutter, I found a pack rat’s nest. I guess the little rat thought my storage shed would be a good place to stake his homestead. I felt differently, and Mr. Pack Rat’s life on this earth came to a sudden and unexpected end that day.

I didn’t have any M-95 respirator masks lying around the house, so I tied one of Liane’s cloth napkins around my face and began deconstructing Mr. Rat’s castle (wondering to myself if Mr. Rat had Hanta virus and whether or not the napkin was an adequate filter). As I moved everything out of the shed, I saw that Mr. Rat had been busy. His primary construction material consisted of leaves and twigs, about two bushels worth. He’d chewed on some burlap and had made a cozy little bed for himself in the middle of it all behind the disassembled walls of my Christmas Nativity stable which were propped against the back of the shed. Now pack rats are thieves by nature, and this little guy had been busy storing up quite a treasure for himself (most of it stolen from me). As I cleaned out the nest, I found a bottle cap, a golf ball, enough PVC fittings to fill a bucket, a pocket knife (mine), three shelf brackets, a large number of peach pits (I’d wondered why I hadn’t seen any under our tree), some dried-out carrots from our garden, an electronic circuit board and a half-dozen heavy brass hinges!

The little rat had also taken measures to fortify and protect his home full of booty. At strategic locations around the perimeter of his nest, he had carefully arranged thorny twigs from our bougainvilleas! But despite all his stealing and hoarding and efforts to protect his little castle, Mr. Pack Rat didn’t take any of it with him.

Mr. Rat had really made a mess in my shed. He’d gnawed holes in a couple of bags of fertilizer which had spilled out all over the place. And Mr. Rat had been pilfering food from our pet rabbit Peter. Turns out Peter hadn’t been eating nearly as much as I thought he had. Mixed in with the leaves and spilled fertilizer and little caches of rabbit food and all the little treasures, I found the desiccated body of a little bird. And all in and around Mr. Rat’s nest, and all over my storage shed were lots and lots of Mr. Rat’s feces. Mr. Pack Rat’s nest was really nothing but a pile of refuse.

I was reminded of the words of St. Paul:
“More than that, I even consider everything as a loss because of the supreme good of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have accepted the loss of all things and I consider them so much rubbish, that I may gain Christ…”
--Philippians 3: 8

I’m also reminded of the Parable of the Rich Fool:
Then he told them a parable. "There was a rich man whose land produced a bountiful harvest. He asked himself, 'What shall I do, for I do not have space to store my harvest?' And he said, 'This is what I shall do: I shall tear down my barns and build larger ones. There I shall store all my grain and other goods and I shall say to myself, "Now as for you, you have so many good things stored up for many years, rest, eat, drink, be merry!"
But God said to him, 'You fool, this night your life will be demanded of you; and the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?'
Thus will it be for the one who stores up treasure for himself but is not rich in what matters to God."
--Luke 12: 16-21

Mr. Pack Rat stored up quite a treasure for himself, but it was really just so much refuse. We all must ask ourselves what it is we value. Are our minds occupied with earthly things? Or do we seek richness in what matters to God? Jesus Himself tells us that true wealth lies not in the things of this world which are temporary; true wealth lies in the Kingdom of God which is at hand for us.

Saint Paul the Apostle, pray for us!

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home