Gayle Boss | Let Compassion Take Root

Boss:

If as Christians, we believe there is a creator of this beauty, then to see what we have done to it would break us open with anguish so that that hard husk that we’ve put up around our hearts in order to function what we think is efficiently in a world where we need another outlet mall, another Starbucks, more cars on the road, more power plants churning smoke into the air. We’ve had to put up this husk around our hearts to prevent us from seeing what we are doing, thereby, to these beautiful creatures. If that husk can be broken open, and if we can let compassion take its root, then we can begin to change our lives in ways that will make us more whole too, and honor the beauty that God has given us. I am Gayle Boss, and I am a writer, an editor, and a lover of the natural world.

Stump:

Welcome to Language of God. I’m your host, Jim Stump. It’s Maundy Thursday as this episode is released. And if you’ve been listening regularly to the podcast lately, you’ve heard a few extra episodes during Lent. We’ve been reading an excerpt each week from Gayle Boss’ book, Wild Hope. And as promised, we’re ending this series with an interview with Gayle herself. Wild Hope is a book that tells the stories of many different imperiled creatures. The stories are poetic and beautifully written, and each one highlights the suffering that these creatures have experienced because of our actions and inactions.

Does that make it a book for Lent? Does encountering a suffering creature open ourselves up to the more explicit subject of Lent, the suffering of Christ? Can understanding these creatures and their plight connect us to our own sinfulness and Christ’s journey toward the cross? After talking with Gayle, I think the answer to all these questions is yes. She doesn’t turn these beasts into people, but in telling their stories, we see how we have too often failed to live up to our calling as people and have acted beastly toward our fellow creatures.

That should lead us to repentance, and repentance should lead us to compassion, and to a restored relationship with God and others, including our non-human relatives. Remember that every drop of Christ’s blood that was shed on the cross had DNA that linked him to all species on earth. During Lent, we reflect on that blood and how it saves us. And because of Gayle’s book, I’ve been thinking about how we can save these creatures. I hope it makes you think about that too. 

Let’s get to the conversation. 

Stump:

Well, Gayle Boss, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining us.

Boss:

Thank you, Jim. What a pleasure.

Stump:

I feel like I’ve gotten a really interesting perspective on you and your work over the last 40 days, not counting Sundays, this period of Lent that we’re in. We’ve heard clips of an earlier interview that you did with Colin, and then every Monday I’ve heard people reading your words, and that makes me think I know something about you. But on this podcast, we like to start by digging into the personal side of people a little bit. So if you would, give us a little autobiography. Where’d you come from? How did you make it to where you are today, both geographically and vocationally?

Boss:

I grew up in Northwest Michigan, a little town called Charlevoix, right on Lake Michigan. I walked past the lake every day, almost every day, and often was out on it fishing with my dad or swimming with my siblings. My dad grew up on a farm seven miles south of town and owned land out there that had been my grandparents’ land. And so often on weekends, especially Sunday afternoons, the family activity was tromping through the woods looking for creatures, or signs of creatures, wild flowers, mushrooms in season, wild berries in season. So under his tutelage, I developed something of an eye for animals and their habitats. But it really wasn’t until I was an adult that I let myself return to that love. It was having children of my own and seeing their curiosity that caused it all to surge back up like a spring that had been mudded over. It all came to kind of surging back up.

Stump:

So what were you doing in that in between time when you weren’t in connection with the natural world as much?

Boss:

Oh, I lived in Washington DC for 15 years, really out of touch with the natural world. We lived right in the inner city. And I worked for a number of nonprofits as a writer, writing about everything from Christians resisting the nuclear arms race to education for inner city people, access to education. I taught at a school, helped found a school to help especially low income women get their high school diplomas. Projects like that while being deeply involved in the life of our inner city church. I guess that love of the natural world resumed when I moved back to Michigan with my husband to raise our two boys, and we bought a house at the edge of the Calvin University Ecosystem Preserve. And watching my children light up under the discovery of the natural world reminded me of my own childhood, and I threw myself with abandon back into that early childhood love.

Stump:

How’d you become a writer, or why did you become a writer?

Boss:

On my website, I tell the story of how I remember writing my very first story in fourth grade. And interestingly, it was about a small rabbit lost in a big woods. I had no idea that my writing career would lead me to creatures in woods and other habitats, but it did. In between, I wrote about lots of things. But that’s when I wrote my first story. And I’ve always been, I remember that, obviously for all the memories of your childhood that you can remember, I remember writing that story in fourth grade. So that says to me something about the salience of writing and the importance of language to me, even as a child. I remember rocking in the pew in church to the words of the King James version of the Psalms. So words and their rhythms and their stories seem always to have been important to me. But as I say, I’ve written about many things.

Stump:

So tell us a little bit more about your religious tradition that you’ve come out of, and perhaps are still in today, or what’s that?

Boss:

Yeah. I grew up in the Reformed Church in America, kind of a standard Calvinist upbringing. But because we were isolated from the Calvinists of, say, Southwest Michigan way up there in the northwest corner, we had to be a little more ecumenical. So I also attended a Methodist youth group, and I attended services at an Assemblies of God’s service because I loved the spiritual rowdiness of that congregation, which I wasn’t getting in my Calvinist upbringing. So although I grew up in the Reformed Church of America, pretty early on, I was drawn to ecumenism and learning from other traditions. Really it wasn’t though till I went to Washington DC and this church that we were part of, the Church of the Savior, that I was exposed to the riches of Quakers and Catholics, and especially monastic communities, like even the Cistercians up in the Blue Ridge.

Stump:

And today back in Michigan, are you part of a local community, church community?

Boss:

Yes. I’m part of Christian Reformed Church with my husband. But again, I like to think of myself as ecumenical. I often attend Church of God in Christ with some neighbors and a Black Gospel church with some other neighbors. They have outdoor gospel sings in the summer that I like to attend. My daughter-in-law’s an Episcopal priest, so I frequent the Episcopal tradition too.

Stump:

Nice. So this is BioLogos, so I’m contractually obligated to ask you something about science. You’ve been talking about nature, and we’ll certainly come back to that, in the books that you’ve written, but do you remember anything growing up particularly about science that was impactful?

Boss:

Other than being terrified of it? No. In college I purposely avoided science classes. I was required to take two. And I took two that could keep me outdoors and out of laboratories. So I did a hiking trip to Colorado that was ostensibly a geology course, but I remember it being a lot more about singing around a campfire and hiking mountains. And I took a course on a boat in Lake Michigan. It was oceanography, but for me it was being out on a boat.

Stump:

That’s pretty fun. Well, good. So you’ve written these books that are about creatures. And the one we’re talking about today is called Wild Hope: Stories for Lent from the Vanishing. For our audience that’s been listening to the podcast over Lent, they’ve heard some of the excerpts of the book, but they’re missing the visuals, which are fantastic. Tell us a little bit about the artists that you worked with for this book.

Boss:

Yeah, a marvelously talented man named David Klein. He lives in Brooklyn. He has an animation studio. He’s drawn for everything from the New York Times to Marvel Comics. He did for this book and for my first book, All Creation Waits, woodcuts of each animal.

Stump:

How’d you get connected to him?

Boss:

Yeah, that’s a story. I’ll give you the thumbnail version. I’ve been a freelance writer ever since my children were small in order to raise them to stay at home with them and work on my own schedule. And one of the publications that I wrote for frequently when I was at home with young children was Weavings. It was called Journal of the Christian Spiritual Life and something else, I’m going to forget the subtitle, but Weavings was the title. And they interestingly commissioned an original woodcut for each of the articles that they published in the quarterly edition. David Klein was assigned to make the woodcut for an article I wrote for, oh, an edition back in I believe, 2003, 2005, something like that.

And I was so taken with his work that I remembered it when it came time to choose an illustrator for All Creation Waits. So I suggested him gently to Paraclete Press as an illustrator that we might consider. A standard publishing contract usually says that the author has no say in what a book’s illustrations or typeface or design looks like. But because I was so compelled by David’s woodcuts, and thought of them as a perfect match for this book, All Creation Waits first and then Wild Hope, I proposed it to the editors. And they were very gracious in considering David and believing with me that his illustrations would be a perfect compliment to the text. And in fact, I think helped sell the book.

Stump:

I was going to say, the experience of this book without those would be very different, right?

Boss:

Yes.

Stump:

And they’re just fantastic.

Boss:

I think people think browsing on the bookshelves, on shelves of a bookstore, see those illustrations first. They’re drawn in before they read a single word by the illustrations.

Stump:

It’s hard to get cuter than the illustration of the koala with the baby on its back. And maybe hard to be more haunting than the illustration of the bonobo that’s kind of looking right in your eye. I’m curious if you have any favorites from the illustrations that are in here, or is that like picking your favorite child exactly?

Boss:

Yes, it is. I am also a big fan of the bonobo illustration. If there were another favorite, the orangutan. I guess it’s that mother and child connection that really pulls me forward. Yes.

Stump:

Well, the chapters of this book are organized into parts that echo Jesus’s admonition in the parable of the sheep and the goats. The hungry, the sick, the homeless. I guess we don’t get the prisoner, but we do get the poisoned and the hunted and the desecrated. So for each of these parts, there’s a collection of animals that then have great description of the uniqueness of those animals, their awesome abilities, their way of life. Then what we have done to them that puts their existence in peril. I suspect there could be many more volumes of animals like this, right? How did you pick which ones that got included here, and which ones were on the short list that didn’t quite make the cut?

Boss:

That was difficult. As you know, there are tens of thousands that could have been included in the book. I chose them with an eye to the globe. I wanted to show that this phenomenon of extinction is global, not just an African problem or an Asian problem, but it’s global. I wanted to include an animal from every class or every family of animals. So everything from insects to large mammals. I wanted to include animals that were dying for various reasons, loss of habitat or poisoning. And I wanted to mix them so that we didn’t get all mammals in one section or all birds in another section. So that was how I chose them and how I put them together. But there were times when it was difficult and they were all clamoring to be included. I think the animals want their stories told. And they’re voiceless except for us.

Stump:

So this is Holy Week as we’re releasing this episode. And the animal for today on Maundy Thursday is the Atlantic bluefin tuna. Can you tell us a little bit about these amazing creatures?

Boss:

Oh, wow. Where to start? I did refer in the story of the bluefin tuna to a number of his capabilities that seem to me to echo or to call up analogies to the Christ. I refer to him as ocean light enfleshed, and the way he lives as a cross boundary migration. And the fact that he travels with a small school, maybe like the 12 disciples. And that because of his amazing circulatory system, he is in a numb world warm, which seems to me an interesting description of Jesus. In a numb world, he was warm. And that’s what we want to be.

Those are just a few of the amazing capacities they have, including that fervent urgent need to return to their birthing grounds in the late spring of the year. So these bluefin tuna are traveling up, some populations of them, up the Atlantic Coast. And then suddenly there is this urge to cross the Atlantic and go to the Mediterranean where they were birthed. That kind of compulsion, maybe it’s like Jesus turning his face to Jerusalem. Again, a parallel I saw, and that seemed apt for Holy Week. That just is awesome and compelling to me.

Stump:

Are all Atlantic bluefin tuna spawned in the Mediterranean?

Boss:

I don’t remember that. The research was that long ago. I don’t believe so. I believe there are some that are spawned in the Gulf of Mexico, but I don’t remember that.

Stump:

But you give some description of people even 1,000 years ago that would stand out—

Boss:

In the time of Jesus.

Stump:

—on the Straits of Gibraltar and see these fish coming into the Mediterranean like that.

Boss:

Oh yeah. In the time of Jesus, people would stand up on these promontories and watch them stream in by the thousands.

Stump:

And now, not. What has happened?

Boss:

Overfishing has happened, and pollution of their spawning grounds. Mainly overfishing.

Stump:

And they’ve become delicacies for sushi. Is this the—

Boss:

And sashimi.

Stump:

—main driver of the overfishing?

Boss:

Yes. Yes. And interestingly, a century ago, there was no appetite for it. In North America when they were caught along the Atlantic Coast, they were thrown away for pet food. And in Japan when they were caught, they were buried for days to mellow the flavor. People didn’t like it when it came straight out of the water. So tastes change, and they could change again.

Stump:

Okay. This is a fascinating creature. There’s lots of other fascinating creatures. Most of the description in the text is just on the very observational, the empirical level of here’s what these creatures are, here’s what they do. In talking to you now, I hear more of the depth, sort of the theological depth behind many of the words that you’ve used, the way you’ve told these stories.

But I even suspect that say many in our audience who have been listening throughout Lent, and if they only heard the excerpts from the book, they’d be asking, “Why is this a Lenten book? Why? What is it about this that is Christian? There’s not a lot of Jesus in the text itself.” How do you respond when people ask you those kinds of questions about a book that is very obviously constructed particularly for this season on the Christian calendar. And that they’re not quite seeing the overt theological content of your book?

Boss:

Yeah, yeah. Well, first I like to think that it’s written poetically enough that there are those innuendos to the Christ story in every creature. Like the way the pangolin, for example, curls herself around her child. That seems to me like a picture of the way God will protect us. It seems to echo the Psalms also. But I take your point that, even if poetic, they are observations of the creatures. They’re not didactic or direct theological references to the Christ story as we know it.

I have had readers write to me to say this is misadvertised. There’s not a Lenten theme in this because we don’t follow Jesus on the way to the cross. I think we do. I think that God’s beauty is the thing that we are watching suffer in every single creature of this book. And that is the heart of the Lenten story, the manifestation of God and God’s beauty in the world. In the human species displayed most eloquently in Jesus, but in all other species suffering because of our egregiously violent and greedy behavior.

Stump:

So there’s a fascinating story that you relate in the introduction of how you came to this position that perhaps came out of an experience with your own kids of trying to relate some of these things that didn’t go quite as well as you would’ve hoped for. Tell our audience that story if you would.

Boss:

Yeah. Once again, my children were my teachers. I first of all had no affinity for Lent myself, no affection for Lent myself. But I felt it incumbent upon me as the mother of children I had hoped would become Christian themselves to try to win them into the season of Lent, coax them into the season of Lent. So when they were about four and nine, I remember sitting at the kitchen table with them. And I had a dictionary open and I said, “Lent, see in its root word,” we read a lot of dictionaries when they were children, “Lent in its root word means spring. And in spring things open and grow.” And they were looking out the window at the snow. So that was not very compelling to them. And then I came upon the tradition, the Christian tradition that sees the ark as a way to describe our—

Stump:

Noah’s ark.

Boss:

—Lenten passage. Noah’s ark, as a way to describe our Lenten passage. And I thought, great. Noah’s ark. There’s a story that kids love. It’s about a big boat, and it’s a boat bigger than grandpa’s boat. How that engrosses the imagination. The boys could see a gigantic boat bigger than our house, way bigger than grandpa’s boat. And it would have animals on it. And I knew they loved animals. This was wonderful.

So I was describing Noah’s ark and the animals, and how that was going to be the centerpiece of our Lenten celebration this year. And then I tried to get theological with them and describe how this Lenten ark was like the church. And the water was the chaos of all the troubles that human people get themselves involved in. Oh yes. And it’s also like baptism, and it strips us clean of our hardness of heart. And the boys just wilted because they were still back there with the animals.

Stump:

Tell us about the animals.

Boss:

Tell us more about the animals, and how we’re going to talk about and learn about animals during Lent. And I discovered that finally years later, that the boys were right actually. That it was the animals that could bring us to the heart of Lent, by focusing on their amazingness, which is what they’d wanted to do all the time. And as we looked at their amazingness, and then in their way of being in the world, we couldn’t help but be led to their suffering in the world that humans have created around them, the world we’ve stripped from them.

[musical interlude}

BioLogos:

Here at BioLogos, we think that asking questions is a worthwhile part of any faith journey. We hope this podcast helps you to think through long-held questions and consider new ones. But if you want to go further, you might want to check out our common questions page, you’ll find questions like, how could humans have evolved and still be in the image of God? Should we trust science? And did death occur before the fall? Each with thoughtful, in-depth answers, written in collaboration by scientists, biblical scholars, and other experts. Just go to biologos.org and click the common questions tab at the top of the page.

Stump:

So seeing the animals themselves, seeing the beauty of the animals, and then the suffering that we have caused to the animals that you’re describing here, becomes the Lenten journey in a sense. And for people who are still questioning, but wait a second, don’t we have to say that theology to go along with this? I think one of the great responses to that comes in your previous book about Advent. What’s the name of the book from Advent? All Creatures—

Boss:

All Creation Waits.

Stump:

All Creation Waits. At the beginning of that, you quote Meister Eckhart saying this, “Every single creature is full of God and is a book about God. Every creature is a word of God. If I spent enough time with the tiniest creature, even the caterpillar, I would never have to prepare a sermon. So full of God is every creature.”

Boss:

Every creature. Yes.

Stump:

That’s beautiful. And captures exactly what you’re trying to do here, right?

Boss:

Yes. Yes. This is a manifestation of God. So the orangutan is that manifestation of God that is hairy and orange and swings through the trees. And the pangolin is that manifestation of God that is scaly and crawls through the forests of the Himalayas with scales so tough that a tiger’s teeth can’t pierce it.

Stump:

But now to apply that specifically to Lent, this book begins with a quote from the Apostle Paul. “All creation groans in this one great act of giving birth,” is the translation that you use there. And at the end of the introduction, you say, “If we hear these other creatures groaning, they’ll midwife our birth into new lives of unbounded compassion, what Paul called the glorious liberty of the children of God.”

Boss:

Children of God.

Stump:

So I’m trying to resist the urge to take beautiful writing, poetic writing, and reduce it down to, but what does this really mean? As though that’s the important thing as opposed to the beautiful writing that evokes in us these images. But talk a little bit more about this metaphor, if you would, and the groaning of all creation as though it’s in childbirth, and how these animals and their stories might play the midwife in order to give birth to what in us during this season of Lent, are you hoping to see?

Boss:

My hope in writing the book was that if we could be waked to their amazing beauty and the intricacy of their lives, that we would be broken open with anguish at the suffering we have caused them. If as Christians we believe there is a creator of this beauty, then to see what we have done to it would break us open with anguish so that hard husk that we’ve put up around our hearts in order to function what we think is efficiently in a world where we need another outlet mall, another Starbucks, more cars on the road, more power plants churning smoke into the air. We’ve had to put up this husk around our hearts to prevent us from seeing what we’re doing, thereby, to these beautiful creatures. If that husk can be broken open, and if we can let compassion take its root, then we can begin to change our lives in ways that will make us more whole too, and honor the beauty that God has given us.

I think that’s what Jesus was trying to do with all of his stories, not to mention his life, is to break us open to compassion for others, no matter what species. I think it’s when we have been broken open to that kind of compassion, boundless compassion that crosses all the boundaries we put up of race, gender, species, whatever it may be, that that’s when we become the children of God in glorious liberty, the liberty that was intended for us. It’s compassion that midwives us into that liberty. And so long as we’ve got up defenses, we’re not living liberated lives.

Stump:

Your comparison of that to what Jesus would do sometimes in telling stories and giving that really interests me here now. Because another thing that Jesus used to sometimes say to the crowds when he was telling a story, giving a parable, a word picture of some sort would be, “Let anyone who has ears to hear, hear this.” Or, “If you have the eyes to see something.” And this makes me wonder about this approach of telling the stories of these animals in the way that you have.

Do we need the eyes to see in order for that compassion to be birthed in us as opposed to, oh, you just told me a bunch of interesting facts about this animal, right? So as in my discipline of philosophy, we sometimes talk about the difference between seeing that as opposed to seeing as, where I have the conceptual ability to see something as maybe what it really is.

So for example, two different people might look into a microscope. If one of them is me, I would look into the microscope and see just a bunch of blobs. But somebody else perhaps who’s been trained in the right way, she might look into it and see cancer cells. Where we have the exact same visual representation coming, but because of the stuff she knows, she’s able to see this as something else.

So I’ve been wondering if there’s something similar here with suffering. Does all suffering take us to what you’ve called the white hot core of Lent. Or do I have to have some categories for understanding the suffering in a particular way, call it suffering as, not just suffering that? Do we need the eyes to see these magnificent suffering creatures as you’ve presented us with as the suffering of God’s beauty?

Boss:

Yes. And I wrote the book as I did, not a compilation of scientific facts. You can find that in—

Stump:

Wikipedia.

Boss:

—anywhere. You can find that in a number of places. But I tried to show instead or to write instead these facts as has, not only metaphors for connecting us to the biblical metaphors like ocean light enfleshed rather than simply-

Stump:

The shimmering fish.

Boss:

Or made up of these wavelengths. So a purely scientific look at it would say the fish appears this iridescent silver blue because it has these wavelengths constructing its skin or something. I told you I wasn’t good at the science itself. But reading the science, which I did, what I saw and felt was ocean light enfleshed. Which gives me not only a bodily experience, but a call to the biblical metaphor of Jesus as the light of the world. And even to the Genesis metaphor, God separates the light and then the waters. And so you get light in the waters, which is what the blue fin is.

Stump:

Are you, maybe disappointed isn’t the right word, but are you disappointed as an author if the audience doesn’t catch all of those illusions that you’ve worked pretty hard to put into there in these descriptions that have this depth to them. That the casual reader might just skip right over, and never realize, oh, I didn’t realize that she was pointing me toward Christ in the way she described this fish.

Boss:

I suppose. But even if a reader gets just a few of them, that’s good too. So back to Jesus and Jesus’s affinity for stories, and the way I wrote stories of each creature, I think we begin to see the suffering of the Christ in these animals when we have bodily experience. When we have grounded experience of these creatures. So Jesus tells stories because it pulls us into a bodily experience of a shepherd out in the mountains looking for that lost sheep. The fear he feels looking for that sheep, all of his senses tuned, looking for that sheep.

I try to describe the bluefin tuna as a person who is right there with the fish in the water, seeing, trying even to be inside the creature to sense the magnetic pull he feels towards certain migration routes. So to give the reader a bodily experience. Because when we have a sensual experience of another, then we begin to feel its suffering and its pleasure. Then we begin to identify, and then we know the suffering, can know the suffering as our own.

Stump:

It’s really beautiful. Beautiful in an appropriate Lenten kind of way as we see these magnificent creatures, but are also drawn into the compassion that you’re trying to let them give birth to us in us. So thank you. Thank you for writing these stories the way you have. And I got to read the one on the Indiana bat a few weeks ago, and feel as though I’ve been drawn into something that’s geographically relevant to me. I didn’t even know these creatures were suffering the way they are around the place that I live.

But as we air this episode, as I said, it’s Maundy Thursday, and entirely appropriate that we’re still in the throes of suffering with the suffering of God’s beauty this week. But Sunday is coming. So let’s hear a story and conclusion that appears to be ending well, and pointing us towards some hope where that wild hope isn’t entirely unseen, even still, but has been enacted in some concrete steps. So tell us about the Takhi. Where does-

Boss:

Takhi.

Stump:

Where does the accent fall on the name of this creature?

Boss:

I believe it falls—Takhi—just the way you said it. Yes.

Stump:

And what has happened to it, and the hope that is starting to be seen for this creature.

Boss:

Yes. Takhi is the name that the indigenous Mongolians give to a creature that science and most people have heard called Przewalski’s horse, the only truly wild horse in the world. It was extinct in the wild by 1969. That’s when the last one was seen in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia. There had already been a few that had been captured and were in zoos around the world. In about the 1950s, scientists saw that this creature was in fact disappearing quickly. And they began a captive breeding program for Przewalski’s horse. At that point, there was no intention to reintroduce them to the wild. It was simply to—

Stump:

Keep them alive. Yeah.

Boss:

—preserve the species for observation. But at about 1970, there was a Swiss ecobiologist named Claudia Feh, F-E-H, who went to the caves in the south of France, where you can see the paintings of wild creatures deep in these caves, bison, aurochs. All creatures that are extinct or were by 1970 extinct in the wild, including Przewalski’s horse, wild horses.

She fell in love with all of these creatures, but particularly the horse, the wild horses. And devoted herself to learning everything there was to learn about these wild horses, Przewalski’s horse. In the early 1980s, I believe, she bought 11 of these wild horses from various zoos. And she took them to the south of France where she had land. And against all recommendation from scientists, biologists, she let them loose on this land to let them become wild again. That was her hope, that they could indeed become themselves again.

After a decade, that small herd of 11 had grown to 55 wild horses. And I say in the text, they had learned who they were again. Aggression had faded from the herd. The stallions no longer killed the foals, which was a problem in captivity. As so many animals do become in captivity, they had developed these compensatory behaviors for the madness that captivity imposed on them, being out of their habitat.

She decided that the time was right. And I believe it was 1994, the early ’90s, ’94 seems right, she selected 12. Interestingly, 12. Put them on a cargo plane with her team, and flew them 45 hours back to the Gobi Desert in Mongolia. They fed the horses apples and hay. They sang to them. They told them stories. And when they landed in the Gobi Desert, they found that the native people, some of them had ridden hundreds of miles on their tamed horses. They had heard, they had learned that the wild horses were coming back. And when she lined up these 12 crates outside the cargo plane, the elders came forward. And they put an elder on the top of each crate and poured mare’s milk, the milk of a mare horse, through the slats of the crate onto these wild horses, each one, as a sign of blessing.

And then they pulled the slats. I can still cry, thinking how beautiful it was. They pulled the slats open and the horses ran out again, recognizing their home. And they galloped off onto the steppe of the Gobi Desert. Since then, wild horses have been released at two other sites in Mongolia, also in sites in China, Kazakhstan, and the Ukraine. And they have multiplied to be somewhere around 2,700 horses, wild horses living in their native habitat. Including, this is incredible to me, in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, where the nuclear reactor in 1986 created a devastation, a desolate land. But a herd of 150 or so thrives in that place now. So it’s an example to me of a few people having this dream, seeding this dream of hope, and acting on it, nurturing it, loving it into existence. To which the horses themselves, something deep within them, the Christ, I believe, deep within them responded. Wild hope.

Stump:

It’s beautiful. The realist in me fears that not all of these creatures’ stories will end that way. But that might make it even more meaningful and special when you hear one that does, when somebody’s vision is able to be enacted in that way.

Boss:

But they could. If we, not just the scientists and the conservationists, but if we saw their dream, the dream of the conservationists, if we saw what we’re doing to them, and if we were willing to take ourselves out of the isolation of our species and live bigger lives, bigger lives of compassion, we could change our lives.

Stump:

Well, may it be so. Well, Gayle, what’s next? You’ve got Advent and Easter covered. Is there another book for Pentecost coming? Anything else on the church calendar that can be correlated to some creatures stories?

Boss:

Well, I usually start, not with the liturgical season, but with the animals. And I would like to write a book about animals we hold captive for our purposes. Everything from research animals to animals we keep for entertainment, clothing, and even food. Animals we farm, and that we therefore use for our purposes to their detriment, even to their suffering. I’ve been trying to write that book for almost three years, and I’m not succeeding. We have so many defenses put up to looking at these animals with eyes other than our purpose, our use.

Every attempt I’ve made, every approach I’ve tried, I think is alienating or it just is poor writing. So I’m struggling to write that book, and I don’t know if I will. I also think maybe the time is not right. I say in the epilogue to the new edition, the gift edition of All Creation Waits, that I don’t think the world was ready for All Creation Waits, the easiest to approach of the two books, until 2016. It wasn’t even until that year, I think, that we had begun to be willing to see creatures as our kin. Certainly not back in the early 1990s when I was thinking about animals and talking to my children about them as kin.

Stump:

Well, if it helps the writer’s struggle, know that you have a ready and willing audience here for that book when it’s written.

Boss:

Thank you.

Stump:

And would love to talk to you again.

Boss:

Thank you.

Stump:

But thanks so much, Gayle. We do hope to talk to you again. But thank you for your work that you’ve done and for the beautiful language that these animal stories are told in. And thanks so much for talking to us here today.

Boss:

Well, it’s a pleasure to have such probing and insightful questions.

BioLogos:

Language of God is produced by BioLogos, has been funded in part by the Fetzer Institute, the John Templeton Foundation, and by individual donors and listeners who contribute to BioLogos. Language of God is produced and mixed by Colin Hoogerwerf. That’s me. Our theme song is by Breakmaster Cylinder. BioLogos’ offices are located in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the Grand River Watershed. If you have questions or want to join in a conversation about this episode, find a link in the show notes for the BioLogos forum, or visit our website, biologos.org, where you’ll find articles, videos, and other resources on faith and science. Thanks for listening.