A Paradox of God, a Cow, and an Elf

The Latest Installment of The Walking Stick Journal

The Walking Stick Journal

Stepping Stones of Transformation

An Unfolding Manuscript

by

C. D. Baker

Chapter Twenty: A Paradox of God, a Cow, and an Elf

Most of us are wired with a great need for resolution. We are discomforted when confused; we are disturbed by incoherence.

Without the support of our logic we feel lost, even threatened.

However, a great deal of life is not that manageable. We are sometimes confronted by experiences that feel contradictory. But if we let our eyes blur a little and experience things with humility, it may just be that the apparent contradiction is actually a paradox—a tension in reality that points to a level of meaning beyond our mere logic.

Paradox can be troubling.

It has the power to undo things.

And can be a blessing, well-disguised.

Journal Entry: Christmas 2022

I was dressed in my elf suit on a bitterly cold Pennsylvania Christmas night. The house was full of happy guests enjoying a roaring hearth. Carols were spinning on the old turntable and the kitchen island looked very much like a sugar paradise. Laughter, banter, candles, and a beautiful reading of the Luke 2 story made for a Hallmark special.

A distant bellowing somehow caught my ear, and I glanced downhill to spot one of the cows in my pasture in apparent distress under moonlight. I threw on my coat and hurried to find the herd circled around her with a 2000 lb bull gently leaning his massive head against her back as she wailed. A series of vets were called but no one answered. A couple of us rolled the poor cow over and helplessly watched her continue to bloat. We covered her with a canvas tarp.

The bull and his herd gradually faded into the darkness. My guests shivered uphill to the warmth of the house. I stayed alone with the desperate animal, leaning my hands on her and praying for God to be merciful. But all I heard was silence...except for the groaning cow and her six-week-old calf starting to ball.

There we were: God, a suffering cow, and me in an elf suit.

The hours passed and I felt a sickening sadness for the animal’s increased suffering. I also felt anger toward God who claims to keep his eye on sparrows. Where was his attention tonight?

But hadn’t he been so present in kindness and gentle mercy at my son’s hospital bedside just months before? I grit my teeth.

I looked up at the warm house where the hope of Christmas was being celebrated. I then looked deeply into the bloodshot eyes of the suffering cow. She cried out again as if pleading with me to save her. The juxtaposition of the two scenes was disorienting, even incoherent. I was confused.

It then hit me that this paradox is our reality and the thought made me anxious.

I tried pressing compassion into the cow with my hands, speaking to her the best I could. But what do you say to a dying cow?

Frozen to the bone, I reluctantly climbed back up the hill to thaw out. There was nothing I could do but hope for something good to happen. The whole thing felt like a tragic satire, a morality play mocking the claims of Christmas with a writhing cow and her lonely calf.

Uneasy, I soon hurried back downhill and found her dead. I choked and shook my head. The little calf stood over her and my eyes filled. Please don’t tell me she was only a cow. For me she was the entire creation, groaning.

Anyone with a heartbeat should weep for the world from time to time.

Still in my ridiculous elf suit, I trudged back to my guests. I wheezed through the night air, realizing that this scene really was a microcosm of reality; it was a representation of the disconcerting mystery of a world simultaneously filled with hope and suffering, light and darkness, joy and grief.

I hate being born on this battlefield. I can’t comprehend it. I can’t fix it.

Over the next days I wondered—even hoped—that maybe my hands had been used by God to offer comfort to the cow—that I was his way of showing mercy. Maybe. I’d like to think that, but it feels a little bit like I’m trying to get God off the hook.

But whose hook?

I know the answer and it shames me.

It’s taken a week of reflection to see more in this. The fact is that the poor cow blessed me that night. Because of her, I experienced my intellectual impotency. Her suffering against the backdrop of Christmas delivered a stinging reminder from the starry sky: “David, you will never be able to grasp the mystery of this present age. Can you handle that?”

Handle that? I hate that.

Yet, accepting the truth of my limitations is a strange kind of relief. It is an important invitation to stop striving after that which is not mine to have. Stripped of any shred of control, I was liberated to collapse in that place where our only comfort is the divine gift of trusting that something more is going on—that this is not the end of anyone’s story.

I’m still processing all of this, and I thank that cow. The experience with my son had taught me that God really is present and good. This night reminded this stubborn man that I have no resources of my own that can contain the world.

The sad paradox of Christmas lights and dark dying made me listen, differently. And in the days that followed I have heard this: “David, you are my beloved son, and you belong to me. That’s all you’ll ever need to know.”

I am still meditating on that truth. And I’m comforted in watching the orphaned calf romping in the pasture alongside the new mother that has welcomed her.

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